Re: Re: Re: fsck --full is Ok, but clones are not, "missing commits"?!

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2008, 12:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20080416121424.GA3133@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <a537dd660804160448w5ba28f13m8c081ebc2a71db91@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 01:48:13PM +0200, Brian Foster wrote:

> 
>  now, showing that I am indeed essentially a git newbie,
>  WTF is a "graft"?  I don't recall running into the term.

info/grafts::
	This file records fake commit ancestry information, to
	pretend the set of parents a commit has is different
	from how the commit was actually created.  One record
	per line describes a commit and its fake parents by
	listing their 40-byte hexadecimal object names separated
	by a space and terminated by a newline.

Basically, you use it if you want to modify the history in your repository. It is often used after importing to Git from some other repository if you want to make some adjustment to history. So, you edit info/grafts, then use gitk to verify that you got what you want, and after that you run git-filter-branch to actually overwrite the history.

info/grafts should never be used during normal work.

>  the goal is to put things into a sane state so any new
>  clones are healthy.  there's only one(?) existing clone,
>  which may or may not be(? become?) an issue.

If you run git-filter-branch then you'll change "fake" history to the real one, and after that the repository can be cloned. Please, make sure that you have a backup before any further changes.

Dmitry