How can I issue a pull request from a local branch?

[David Frascone]

So, this question is really asking several questions.  First, our normal workflow is:

1. Clone from our development branch, and branch that into a work branch.
2. Work, commit, etc. 
3. Finally, push changes from the work branch up to stash, then issue a pull request.

While that works, it does require occasional branch cleanup.

The problem is:  Now we're using hipchat, and we love seeing our stash pull messages in hipchat.  But, we can't filter for a single branch, we have to exclude ones we don't want to see, and that wastes a lot of time.

What we'd really like to be able to do is:

1. Clone from the development branch.
2. Work, commit, etc.
3. optional: If long running, even push back to stash occasionally as a backup.
4. Create pull request from local branch, into development branch

That would keep the hipchat noise down, and, it would prevent needing to clean branches off of stash.

Any thoughts?  Is there a way to do what I'm trying to do?  (Lots of parallel development, but we only want to see pull requests / commits from the development branch in stash)

[Balázs Szakmáry]

First of all, consider anything not pushed to the server as non-existent. If your computer/disk dies, your work dies with it. We instruct our users to use always the "commit and push" option, unless they have a very good reason not to. In my opinion, having everything backed up is completely worth the price of having to clean things up every once in a while. (Also, this way if somebody gets sick or something similar, somebody else can continue from where they stopped by getting the branch from the server.)

Secondly, it looks like your main problem is with the HipChat notifications, not the code being on the server. I am not very knowledgeable about HipChat, but I think you should tweak the configuration of HipChat instead of changing how you work with the code. Maybe it could only include messages about PR's being opened/approved/merged/declined instead of all events. The participants of the code review will get the e-mail notifications about the comments anyway.