Re: git pull for update of netdev fails.
- From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
- Date
- Sep 20, 2006, 16:19 UTC
- Message-ID
- <Pine.LNX.4.64.0609200915550.4388@g5.osdl.org>
- In-Reply-To
- <20060920160756.GP8259@pasky.or.cz>
On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:
> > I personally don't think "throwing away" history is an issue. You can > print the old sha1 and it is still in the database so you can recover > it.
No it isn't. Once you've lost the reference, you can't really depend on it any more in the long run.
A lot of people do things like "git repack -a -d" by hand, and we've tried to encourage people to do so in cron-jobs etc. We've even had patches floating around that do it automatically after a pull.
In other words, once a ref is gone, you are easily going to loose the history to it too. Also, regardless, you should be told about it, UNLESS YOU HAVE EXPLICITLY STATED THAT YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT HISTORY!
That's a really important point. You can trivially say "I don't care". It's literally one extra character. But it should be the _user_ that says so, not the SCM.
The whole point of the SCM is to care.
Linus