Re: Bug: Branch Deletion Doesn't Clean Up
- From
Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
- Date
- Feb 4, 2016, 07:54 UTC
- Message-ID
- <20160204075402.GA21112@sigill.intra.peff.net>
- In-Reply-To
- <4AC354E1-9E78-42A8-9828-BF1C084A6CBB@me.com>
On Thu, Jan 07, 2016 at 02:24:41PM -0500, Karl Moskowski wrote:
> The problem is, deleting a branch whose name contains slashes doesn’t > delete the directories in .git/refs/heads/.
Yes. Git's model is to leave the directories in place, and remove them only when they get in the way of creating another ref. In theory, the effect is the same as deleting the directories proactively.
But as you noticed, it does funny things with case-preserving filesystems. It also can cause performance problems if you have a very large number of empty directories (because git has to open each of them just to find out they're empty).
We can into the latter case at GitHub. Michael Haggerty (cc'd) worked up some patches recently for this, but I don't now if they're yet polished enough to send upstream.
> It seems like git branch -d ascend the hierarchy (up to > .git/refs/heads/), deleting any empty directories.
Yes, though it needs to be coupled with making the branch-creation process more robust to races (since we might create "refs/heads/foo" in order to make "refs/heads/foo/bar" while somebody else is deleting it to get rid of "refs/heads/foo/baz").
-Peff