Re: Marking abandoned branches

From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Sep 13, 2006, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20060913173212.GD29933@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910609131022y19327efy541ac451bdf4b009@mail.gmail.com>

Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On 9/13/06, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:
> >
> >> Moving the refs into refs/abandoned would work too. We would need new
> >> git commands to do this and flags on the visualization tools to
> >> include the abandoned branches. On the other hand doing this is
> >> recording state about the repository in the refs directory instead of
> >> writing this state into the repo itself.
> >
> >Well, the refs directory is _part_ of the repository. Think about it, if
> >you do not know which branches are in the object database, you lack a lot
> >of information.
> 
> If you delete all of your heads you can recover them by following all
> of the chains in the repo to find them. Doing this would recover the
> abandoned branches too but it would mix them up with the active heads.
> This is not a big deal but it is info that is getting stored outside
> of the object db.

No. Being able to get a ref back like that is like saying that I can get files back in ext2 by deleting them then running fsck and restoring the lost inodes to '/lost+found'. Sure the data is there but there's no way to tell which file is which!

The name of a ref, like the name of a file, is pretty important when it comes to describing it. Just having the SHA1 ID of 100 commits is pretty useless; it could take weeks to determine which branch head is which. The refs database is an important part of the usability of a Git repository.

-- 
Shawn.