Re: Recovering Committed Changes in a Detached Head?

From: Joel C. Salomon <joelcsalomon@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 9, 2011, 03:32 UTC
Message-ID: <4E9115B0.3030701@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <ab706826-75df-4410-941e-6b40ec92713c@email.android.com>

On 10/08/2011 06:00 PM, Martin Fick wrote:

>> git reflog to the rescue.

<snip>

Show 11 quoted lines

>> There you see the first line of the commit message from your "lost"
>> commit, and you can do
>>
>>  git checkout -b lost_detached_head 92aa5381
>>
>> and you get a branch pointing to that commit you made while on
>> detached head, and you can work with it as usual.
> 
> While rflog is cool, I can't help but think that git could be even more helpful for these scenarios.
> 
> First, maybe git could create refs for these automatically, perhaps with a name like orphans/1?  Maybe these refs would only be visible via git branch --orphans.

Creating these "orphan" refs would require the equivalent of (part of) git-fsck; I can't imagine that could be imposed without significant overhead on too many operations. I think you'd be better off wrapping git-fsck in a script that can create these branches.

--Joel