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From: bdowning@lavos•net (Brian Downing)
To: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox•com>
Cc: David Symonds <dsymonds@gmail•com>, Bill Lear <rael@zopyra•com>,
	Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail•com>,
	Git Mailing List <git@vger•kernel.org>
Subject: Keeping reflogs on branch deletion
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:01:52 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20080214140152.GT27535@lavos.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7vr6fgkxt2.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 07:43:21PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> People often mistake that the safety of "branch -d" is to not
> lose the commit (i.e. not making it unreachable), but that is
> not the case.  That safety already exists in HEAD reflogs.
> 
> The "branch -d" safety is about not losing the particular point.
> The information we really are trying to protect is "this branch
> points at _that commit_", which is just as important if not
> more.

This actually brings up something I've been intending to ask.

When deleting a branch, is there any reason we can't add a deletion
entry into the reflog and keep the reflog around?  This would seem to be
a lot safer; I know I've been burned by expecting the reflog safety net
to be there, and surprised that it's not when I've deleted a branch.

I expect that the reflog entry would look something like this:

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 4685dfedd47683a476e75166b5c273c0269b7e54 Brian Downing <bdowning@lavos•net> 1202996833 -0600   branch: Created from ubuntu-dapper
4685dfedd47683a476e75166b5c273c0269b7e54 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Brian Downing <bdowning@lavos•net> 1202996863 -0600   branch: Deleted

A couple of problems I've noticed that would have to be fixed for this
to work:

* git log -g (and anything else that can take a reflog) would have to be
  fixed or modified to allow for taking branches that no longer exist:

  :; ls .git/logs/refs/heads/foo
  .git/logs/refs/heads/foo
  :; git log -g foo
  fatal: ambiguous argument 'foo': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
  Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

  My uneducated suspicion is that this may be somewhat hard.

* If the above did work, it would be nice for the deletion entry to
  result in a nice "branch was deleted" entry in log -g output.  Today,
  that entry is missing in its entirety.

-bcd

  reply	other threads:[~2008-02-14 14:02 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2008-02-14  1:39 A couple branch questions Jay Soffian
2008-02-14  1:45 ` David Symonds
2008-02-14  2:24   ` Bill Lear
2008-02-14  3:03     ` David Symonds
2008-02-14  3:43       ` Junio C Hamano
2008-02-14 14:01         ` Brian Downing [this message]
2008-02-14 15:00           ` Keeping reflogs on branch deletion Nicolas Pitre
2008-02-14 15:08             ` Johannes Schindelin
2008-02-14 15:17             ` Jeff King
2008-02-14 16:16               ` Nicolas Pitre
2008-02-14 16:31                 ` Jeff King
2008-02-14 17:32                   ` Nicolas Pitre
2008-02-14 17:57                     ` Jeff King
2008-02-14 20:17                       ` Wincent Colaiuta
2008-02-14 16:35           ` Jakub Narebski

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