From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:23:42 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] logging branch deletion to help recovering from mistakes
Message-ID: <20101207182342.GA3725@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <20101207182040.GA26770@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 10:14:19AM -0800, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> 
> > Per check-ref-format, ref names cannot contain two dots.  We could
> > archive ref logs by renaming them, $GIT_DIR/logs/refs/heads/foo
> > becomes $GIT_DIR/logs/refs/heads/foo..deleted-1.  If foo is created
> > and deleted again, it becomes foo..deleted-2.
...
> > A different approach might be to have $GIT_DIR/logs/refs/REF_ATTIC,
> 
> That seems a lot less efficient, as we have to linearly search all of
> REF_ATTIC to get:
> 
>   1. the reflog for one deleted branch
> 
>   2. the list of deleted branches
> 
> Neither of those is probably particularly performance critical, but it
> just seems like keeping the logs in files indexed by the original ref
> names is a more natural fit.

Yea, I'm leaning more towards the foo..deleted-n idea too, for the
same reasons.  It also makes it easier to GC a deleted branch's
reflog, we can examine the last record's timestamp in a reasonable
time bound and unlink the log if its really freaking old.

-- 
Shawn.