Re: Forcing GC to always fail

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 27 2018, Bryan Turner wrote:

> Something of an odd question, but is there something I can do in the
> configuration for a repository that forces any "git gc" run in that
> repository to always fail without doing anything? (Ideally I'd like to
> make "git reflog expire" _also_ fail.)
>
> Background: For Bitbucket Server, we have a fairly recurrent issue
> where administrators decide they know how to manage garbage collection
> for our repositories better than we do, so they jump on the server and
> start running things like this:
>
> git reflog expire --expire=now –all
> git gc --prune=now
> git repack -adf --window=200 --depth=200
>
> They then come running to us with their corrupted repository expecting
> and/or hoping that we can fix it (often without proper backups).
>
> Bitbucket Server itself never runs "git gc" (or "git reflog expire").
> We've configured how reflog expiry should be handled, but of course
> that's overridden by explicit command line options like
> "--expire=now". We _do_ run "git pack-refs", "git repack" and "git
> prune" (with various options), so those commands need to continue to
> work.
>
> Is there anything I can set, perhaps some invalid configuration
> option/value, that will make "git gc" (most important) and "git
> reflog" (ideal, but less important) fail when they're run in our
> repositories? Hopefully at that point customers will reach out to us
> for help _before_ they corrupt their repositories.

You could fix this and so many other issues by just hanging up a "Is
This Good For The Company?" banner up in Atlassian offices .

But more seriously:
    
    $ stahp='Bryan.Turner.will.hunt.you.down.if.you.manually.run.gc' && git -c gc.pruneExpire=$stahp gc; git -c gc.reflogExpire=$stahp reflog expire
    error: Invalid gc.pruneexpire: 'Bryan.Turner.will.hunt.you.down.if.you.manually.run.gc'
    fatal: unable to parse 'gc.pruneexpire' from command-line config
    error: 'Bryan.Turner.will.hunt.you.down.if.you.manually.run.gc' for 'gc.reflogexpire' is not a valid timestamp
    fatal: unable to parse 'gc.reflogexpire' from command-line config