I have made some changes. I cannot use those changes now. I need to discard them for now and go back to them later when the star alignment is more favorable (e.g. when our Cobol guy has enough time to get to his half of the work).
Short of using Eclipse → Synchronize with team and manually copy pasting the contents to a scratch directory so I can do the merging later, is there any way to "stash" changes for later?
On
There is no git stash equivalent on Serena Dimensions. The poor man's way will be to store your changes temporally on a different folder or a file with different name without including it to the source controlled solution and switching back and forth as needed.
Another alternative is to use streams in order to have your changes source controlled without affecting production code; a typical scenario is to have an Integration and Main streams. But it depends on your access level to the dimension database you are using and your project needs.
A git repo can be maintained locally to have this and other git functionality on your local computer (or even small team with shared folders or a git server) since it does not interfere with Dimensions, as long as you don't store the git metadata in the dimensions managed code and vice versa. This is not a straight forward solution and will require that you know how to set a git repo and precaution on you side when delivering to the Dimension server, but it works and is really helpful if you are familiar with git workflow.
Dimensions is not so friendly as git on this kind of usages, but way more robust for larger and more controlled projects.
Git and Dimensions work on different methodologies. Dimensions allows only to either commit a new version or discard the version, after checking out the file. As indicated above, one can still use streams or individual branches for their development work and can merge/deliver the changes later point in time, without affecting others work.