Re: Keep reflogs for deleted (remote tracking) branches?

> Hi folks,
> 
> I have a practical question in case I missed something.
> 
> Imagine a small team (10ppl) working on a single centralized repo, in
> github for example. They regularly create new branches, and typically
> delete them eventually - after merging, or at other times when
> branches were a dead end or whatever. The members of this team all
> have a "simple" git remote configuration, the result of a "git clone"
> with no special configuration. One exception is that they have set
> "fetch.prune" to "true", because otherwise remote branches that have
> been deleted (in the context of completed merges, or arbitrarily by
> other team members) accumulate locally and having to explicitly prune
> them from time to time is a pain. Every time someone says "why do I
> still see these branches in my repo?", someone else replies "oh, just
> run 'git config fetch.prune true'".
> 
> Now, one day someone deletes a branch accidentally from the server,
> and the sole author of that branch has gone on vacation (or has an IT
> failure, or has left the company, or whatever). Other team members
> have seen this branch go by, it's appeared in their "fetch" output,
> but no-one remembers checking it out, so it's not in their main
> "HEAD" reflogs.
> 
> Even though the ref was at one point on every team member's computer,
> and they still undoubtedly have a dangling commit in their repos,
> they're going to have a hard time finding it - there are many dangling
> commits in any given repo.
> 
> Now my question: is there any way to (temporarily) keep a reflog for
> that deleted/pruned branch, in those team members' repos?
> 
> As far as I can tell, even "core.logAllRefUpdates=always" does *not*
> keep any reflog entries around, even temporarily (until reflog
> expiry), once a ref  is deleted - do I understand that correctly? Is
> this behavior intentional / reasoned, or just a consequence of the
> fact that it's *hard* to keep "managing" per-branch reflogs for
> branches that don't exist?
> 
> I am planning a workaround using server hooks to "back up" refs that
> are being deleted from specific namespaces, in my specific case, and I
> imagine that a system like github keeps track of deleted stuff itself
> for a while, but I find this "per-ref reflog disappearance" behavior
> puzzling / out-of-character, so wanted to make sure I'm not missing
> something.
> 
> Thanks,
> Tao
>