Re: can we prevent reflog deletion when branch is deleted?

> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 05:48:50AM +0530, Sitaram Chamarty wrote:
> 
>> Is there *any* way we can preserve a reflog for a deleted branch,
>> perhaps under logs/refs/deleted/<timestamp>/full/ref/name ?
> 
> I had patches to do something like this here:
> 
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/201715/focus=201752
> 
> but there were definitely some buggy corners, as much of the code
> assumed you needed to have a ref to have a reflog. I don't even run with
> it locally anymore.
> 
> At GitHub, we log each change to an "audit log" in addition to the
> regular reflog (we also stuff extra data from the environment into the
> reflog message). So even after a branch is deleted, its audit log
> entries remain, though you have to pull out the data by hand (git
> doesn't know about it at all, except as an append-only sink for
> writing). And git doesn't use the audit log for connectivity, either, so
> eventually the objects could be pruned.
> 
>> Just some basic protection -- don't delete the reflog, and instead,
>> rename it to something that preserves the name but in a different
>> namespace.
> 
> That part is easy. Accessing it seamlessly and handling reflog
> expiration are a little harder. Not because they're intractable, but
> just because there are some low-level assumptions in the git code. The
> patch series I mentioned above mostly works. It probably just needs
> somebody to go through and find the corner cases.