Re: Isn't "dangling" a misnomer?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 26, 2007, 20:19 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702261216380.12485@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7virdolm8u.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> 
> We seem to use the word "unreachable" to refer to them.
> E.g. fsck and prune do "reachability analysis".

Well, everything that cannot be reached is "unreachable", but not everything is "dangling".

Being "dangling" is a very special case of unreachability: it's not reachable from _anything_ - including other unreachable objects.

So

	git fsck

will report about dangling objects, but

	git fsck --unreachable

will report about unreachable objects, and the result is *not* the same (dangling objects will usually be a very small subset of the unreachable ones, since in many cases *most* unreachable objects end up being pointed to by other unreachable objects, and are thus not the dangling part).

Maybe we could call the dangling objects "unreachable tips" or something. Because dangling => unreachable, but unreachable !=> dangling.

		Linus