Re: can we prevent reflog deletion when branch is deleted?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 1, 2013, 05:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20130601050355.GA23408@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <51A963B7.6060002@alum.mit.edu>

On Sat, Jun 01, 2013 at 05:00:07AM +0200, Michael Haggerty wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> This is a known problem.  The technical reason that this is not trivial
> to solve is the possibility of a directory/file conflict between old
> reflog files and references that might be created subsequently (which in
> turn is a limitation of how loose references and reflogs are mapped to
> filenames):
> [...]
> Peff proposed a solution to this problem [1], but AFAIK it is not making
> progress.

I was running with the patch series you mentioned for a while, but there are some weird bugs with it that need to be tracked down. I don't recall the details, but I would occasionally get error messages that showed that some parts of the code were surprised that the reflog existed without the ref existing.

While I think solving the D/F conflict in the ref namespaces overall would be a nice thing to have, doing it with compatibility with the current system is complex and error-prone. I wonder if simply sticking the reflog entries into a big GRAVEYARD reflog wouldn't be a great deal simpler and accomplish the "keep deleted reflogs" goal, which is what people actually want.

-Peff