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

From
Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date
Jun 1, 2013, 17:56 UTC
Message-ID
<CALkWK0=SqCh-82F4ud+AxuzzEezyMWqMvc6HAPoxOk32vUND7A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To
<CAMK1S_hPups3SCwxhHRYWBJzpPreNVUfNdx1+_Hjy2_d0MMpaA@mail.gmail.com>
Sitaram Chamarty wrote:
> I think I'd have to be playing with *several* branches simultaneously
> before I got to the point of forgetting the branch name!
Yeah, I work on lots of small unrelated things: the patch-series I
send in are usually the result of few hours of work (upto a few days).
 I keep the branch around until I've rewritten it for enough re-rolls
and am sufficiently sure that it'll hit master.
Show 8 quoted lines
> More to the point, your use case may be relevant for a non-bare repo
> where "work" is being done, but for a bare repo on a server, I think
> the branch name *does* have significance, because it's what people are
> collaborating on.
>
> (Imagine someone accidentally nukes a branch, and then someone else
> tries to "git pull" and finds it gone.  Any recovery at that point
> must necessarily use the branch name).

Ah, you're mostly talking about central workflows. I'm on the other end of the spectrum: I want triangular workflows (and git.git is slowly getting there). However, I might have a (vague) thought on server-side safety in general: I think the harsh dichotomy in ff-only versus non-ff branches is very inelegant. Imposing ff-only feels like a hammer solution, because what happens in practice is different: the `master` does not need to be rewritten most of the time, but I think it's useful to allow some "safe" rewrites to undo the mistake of checking in an private key or something [*1*]. By safety, I mean that git should give the user easy access to recent dangling objects by annotating it with enough information: sort of like a general-purpose "pretty" reflog that is gc-safe (configurable trunc_length?). It's a serves more usecases than just the branch-removal problem.

Ofcourse, the standard disclaimer applies: there's a high likelihood that I'm saying nonsense, because I've never worked in a central environment.

[Footnotes]

*1* It turns out that this is not uncommon: https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.ssh%2Fid_rsa&type=Code&ref=searchresults

Previous: Sitaram ChamartyNext: Sitaram Chamarty
Message 8 of 21 in “can we prevent reflog deletion when branch is deleted?”
  1. Sitaram ChamartyJun 1, 2013
  2. Michael HaggertyJun 1, 2013
  3. Jeff KingJun 1, 2013
  4. Ramkumar RamachandraJun 1, 2013
  5. Jeff KingJun 1, 2013
  6. Ramkumar RamachandraJun 1, 2013
  7. Sitaram ChamartyJun 1, 2013
  8. Ramkumar RamachandraJun 1, 2013
  9. Sitaram ChamartyJun 2, 2013
  10. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013
  11. Thomas RastNov 14, 2013
  12. Jeff KingNov 14, 2013
  13. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013
  14. Jeff KingNov 14, 2013
  15. Luca MilanesioNov 14, 2013
  16. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013
  17. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013
  18. Jeff KingNov 14, 2013
  19. Stephen BashNov 14, 2013
  20. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013
  21. Sitaram ChamartyNov 14, 2013

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