Subject: Re: rebase update-refs can delete ref branch

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2022 17:01:37 +0900

Victoria Dye <[email-masked]> writes:

> I believe this is the same bug as one reported back in October [1], where
> deleting all 'update-ref' lines from the 'rebase-todo' inadvertently causes
> the rebase to delete those refs. The bug was fixed in 44da9e0841 (rebase
> --update-refs: avoid unintended ref deletion, 2022-11-07), so you shouldn't
> see the issue anymore in Git that's built from newer revisions (e.g., the
> latest pre-release v2.39.0-rc2 or the upcoming final v2.39.0).

Thanks for digging the history.  It is unfortunate that, even though
the fix exactly identifies b3b1a21d (sequencer: rewrite update-refs
as user edits todo list, 2022-07-19) as the culprit and it is trivial
to see that was shipped as part of Git 2.38, the fix was not queued
to allow merging 44da9e0841 into 2.38.x maintenance track, so it is
unlikely to appear in any 2.38.x maintenance releases we might issue
in the future.

But if the users can afford to update to 2.38.x or 2.39.0, picking
the latter is always better, as the newer feature release has longer
shelf life ;-)