Re: [PATCH 2/2] git-gc: skip stashes when expiring reflogs

> El 12/6/2008, a las 6:32, Eric Raible escribió:
> 
>> Nicolas Pitre <nico <at> cam.org> writes:
>>
>>> As you say, branches are there just for that: keeping changes for
>>> months.  Stashes are not meant to be used like that nor should we
>>> encourage it.
>>
>> This unfortunately goes against the recommended usage in John Wiegley's
>> otherwise excellent "Git From the Bottom Up".  I've contacted him 
>> separately to
>> make him aware of the collective wisdom of not relying on stashes for 
>> long-term
>> storage.
> 
> Yes, we shouldn't _encourage_ people to use stashes as a long-term 
> storage mechanism, but neither should we allow old stashes to silently 
> disappear as a result of reflog expiry, especially as part of automatic 
> garbage collection. There are two reasons:
> 
> (1) Normal reflogs accumulate cruft automatically through normal use and 
> if not cleaned up they'll just grow and grow and grow. On the other 
> hand, for "git stash" to accumulate cruft over the long term the user 
> actually has to take action and _abuse_ them. Abuse is less likely 
> because it requires this conscious action, and as the output of "git 
> stash list" gets bigger and more unwieldy this will serve to encourage 
> people to clean out their stashes themselves, or not let the list grow 
> out of control in the first place. In other words, the size of the stash 
> reflog is unlikely to be a problem.
> 
> (2) Automatically expiring normal reflogs is a service to the user, 
> because it's cleaning up something that is automatically generated. 
> Stashes are the result of a concious user decision to create them, so 
> automatically "cleaning them up" is _not_ going to help the user.
> 

> So yes, branches _are_ better and more appropriate for long term storage 
> than stashes, but even so I don't think it's right for us to risk 
> throwing away information that the user explicitly stashed and expected 
> Git to look after for them.
>