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[PATCH 0/5] not making corruption worse

From
Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date
Mar 17, 2015, 07:27 UTC
Message-ID
<20150317072750.GA22155@peff.net>

This is a grab bag of fixes related to performing destructive operations in a repository with minor corruption. Of course we hope never to see corruption in the first place, but I think if we do see it, we should err on the side of not making things worse. IOW, it is better to abort and say "fix this before pruning" than it is to just start deleting objects.

The issue that spurred this is that I noticed recent versions of git will omit funny-named refs from iteration. This comes from d0f810f (refs.c: allow listing and deleting badly named refs, 2014-09-03), in v2.2.0. That's probably a good idea in general, but for things like "prune" we need to be more careful (and we were, prior to that commit).

Similarly, if you have a ref whose tip object is missing, we tend to just ignore it in our traversals, and it presents a similar problem for pruning. I didn't trace it back, but I think this problem is much older.

The general strategy for these is to use for_each_rawref traversals in these situations. That doesn't cover _every_ possible scenario. For example, you could do:

  git clone --no-local repo.git backup.git &&
  rm -rf repo.git

and you might be disappointed if "backup.git" omitted some broken refs (upload-pack will simply skip the broken refs in its advertisement). We could tighten this, but then it becomes hard to access slightly broken repositories (e.g., you might prefer to clone what you can, and not have git die() when it tries to serve the breakage). Patch 2 provides a tweakable safety valve for this.

And not strictly related to the above, but in the same ballpark, is the issue with packed-refs that I noted here:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/256051/focus=256896

where we can drop broken refs from the packed-refs file during the deletion of an unrelated ref.

The patches are:
  [1/5]: t5312: test object deletion code paths in a corrupted repository
  [2/5]: refs: introduce a "ref paranoia" flag
  [3/5]: prune: turn on ref_paranoia flag
  [4/5]: repack: turn on "ref paranoia" when doing a destructive repack
  [5/5]: refs.c: drop curate_packed_refs
-Peff
Next: Jeff King
Message 1 of 35 in “not making corruption worse”
  1. 0/5 not making corruption worseJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  2. 1/5 t5312: test object deletion code paths in a corrupted repositoryJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  3. Johannes SixtMar 17, 2015
  4. Jeff KingMar 17, 2015
  5. Johannes SixtMar 18, 2015
  6. Junio C HamanoMar 19, 2015
  7. Jeff KingMar 19, 2015
  8. Junio C HamanoMar 19, 2015
  9. Jeff KingMar 19, 2015
  10. Junio C HamanoMar 19, 2015
  11. Jeff KingMar 19, 2015
  12. Eric SunshineMar 20, 2015
  13. Jeff KingMar 20, 2015
  14. Eric SunshineMar 20, 2015
  15. test &&-chain lint (was: [PATCH 1/5] t5312: test object deletion code paths in a corrupted repository)Jeff King, Mar 20, 2015
  16. Jeff KingMar 20, 2015
  17. Jeff KingMar 20, 2015
  18. Eric SunshineMar 20, 2015
  19. Junio C HamanoMar 20, 2015
  20. Junio C HamanoMar 20, 2015
  21. Jeff KingMar 20, 2015
  22. Junio C HamanoMar 20, 2015
  23. Jeff KingMar 20, 2015
  24. 2/5 refs: introduce a "ref paranoia" flagJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  25. Junio C HamanoMar 19, 2015
  26. Jeff KingMar 19, 2015
  27. Junio C HamanoMar 19, 2015
  28. Jeff KingMar 19, 2015
  29. 3/5 prune: turn on ref_paranoia flagJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  30. 4/5 repack: turn on "ref paranoia" when doing a destructive repackJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  31. 5/5 refs.c: drop curate_packed_refsJeff King, Mar 17, 2015
  32. Eric SunshineMar 20, 2015
  33. Jeff KingMar 17, 2015
  34. Junio C HamanoMar 17, 2015
  35. Jeff KingMar 18, 2015

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