Re: should git download missing objects?

[Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>]

Alex Riesen <fork0@t-online.de> wrote:
> Junio C Hamano, Sun, Nov 12, 2006 20:41:23 +0100:
> > Since this is not everyday anyway, a far easier way would be to
> > clone-pack from the upstream into a new repository, take the
> > pack you downloaded from that new repository and mv it into your
> > corrupt repository.  You can run fsck-objects to see if you got
> > back everything you lost earlier.
> 
> I get into such a situation annoyingly often, by using
> "git clone -l -s from to" and doing some "cleanup" in the
> origin repository. For example, it happens that I remove a tag,
> or a branch, and do a repack or prune afterwards. The related
> repositories, which had "accidentally" referenced the pruned
> objects become "corrupt", as you put it.
> 
> At the moment, if I run into the situation, I copy packs/objects from
> all repos I have (objects/info/alternates are useful here too), run a
> fsck-objects/repack and hope nothing is lost. It works, as I almost
> always have "accidental" backups somewhere, but is kind of annoying to
> setup. A tool to do this job more effectively will be very handy (at
> least, it wont have to copy gigabytes of data over switched windows
> network. Not often, I hope. Not _so_ many gigabytes, possibly).


One of my coworkers recently lost a single loose tree object.
We suspect his Windows virus scanner deleted the file.  :-(

Copying the one bad object from another repository immediately fixed
the breakage caused, but it was very annoying to not be able to run a
"git fetch --missing-objects" or some such.  Fortunately it was just
the one object and it was also still loose in another repository.
scp was handy.  :-)

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