Re: [PATCH] logging branch deletion to help recovering from mistakes

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 11:21:46AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I am more worried about stuff in branch.<name>.* that are discarded upon
> "branch -d".  Without the config items, you won't have a working:
> 
>     $ branch -d frotz
>     $ branch --undelete frotz
>     $ git checkout frotz
>     $ git pull

Hmm, yeah, I didn't think about that. Two possible solutions:

  1. Just leave it in .git/config. It is not hurting anything if the
     branch does not exist, but it is cruft in a file the user might
     look at.

  2. Drop it into .git/config.dead/<branch_name>. When resurrecting a
     branch, copy it back into .git/config.

In both cases, when the reflog for the deleted branch is pruned to
nothing, we delete the relevant config, too.

In the second case, I think you would have to take special care for
something like:

  $ git branch frotz origin/master
  $ git branch -d frotz
  $ git remote rename origin foo
  $ git branch --undelete frotz

In the non-deleted case, this transparently renames branch.frotz.remote
from "origin" to "foo". In the deleted case, we would need to make sure
the dead config is updated, too.


To be honest, I have never been that interested in a "branch --undelete"
feature. I much more care about leaving the reflogs of deleted branches
around, so I can "git checkout -b foo bar@{1}" later on[1]. That is, to
me branch undeletion is not about bringing a branch back wholesale, but
rather remembering commits so I can start a new branch there.

But I guess others might disagree.

-Peff

[1] Well, that and just piece of mind from knowing that "branch -d" is
    not totally unrecoverable. Specifically, if we kept deleted reflogs
    around, it would be safe(r) to turn on auto-prune on fetch, the lack
    of which is something that seems to confuse new users.