Re: Question about 'branch -d' safety

From: Clemens Buchacher <drizzd@aon.at>
Date: Jul 13, 2010, 07:13 UTC
Message-ID: <20100713071317.GA26348@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <7v39vo8dkn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 04:50:32PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 
> I am not entirely unsympathetic to add "git branch --undelete frotz" to our
> vocabulary, but then we should leave users an easy way to really remove
> things, and it shouldn't be "git branch -d --i-really-mean-it frotz".
> 
> It would probably be more like "git branch -d frotz" followed by "git
> branch --purge frotz" or "git branch --purge \*" (if we name the operation
> to remove cruft for undelete "purge", that is).

Why would we need that? Even now, it is not enough to do "git branch -D frotz; git gc --prune". You need to expire the reflog, since HEAD may still have a reference to it. So instead you would need

 git branch -D frotz
 git reflog expire --expire=now HEAD frotz
 git gc --prune

Purging a branch becomes just a special case of purging anything from history.

Clemens