Re: Question about 'branch -d' safety

From: Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 13, 2010, 09:00 UTC
Message-ID: <1279011633.2030.17.camel@wpalmer.simply-domain>
In-Reply-To: <4C3C2435.8010500@viscovery.net>

On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 10:30 +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> With that in mind, shouldn't it be exactly the other way around, i.e.,
> dump the reflog (the objects are still referenced from HEAD's reflog), but
> keep the ref around in some attic, just in case the branch is so old that
> its reflog was empty and its objects would otherwise be pruned right away?
> 
> -- Hannes

It would probably be more sensible to add a "deleted" entry to the reflog just prior to removing the ref (yes, this will make HEAD@{1} equal to HEAD@{0} in many cases). Keeping the ref itself around in an attic doesn't make sense - the reflog can act as a better "attic" anyway, if we stop deleting nonempty reflogs just because they don't have a live ref associated with them.

Having a separate "attic" just runs into problems of "what if you delete the ref twice?" and adds an entirely separate mechanism for tracking something which we already have a perfectly good method of tracking: the previous state of a ref.