Re: how to remove unreachable objects?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 02:38:41PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Yeah, I've been thinking about making it an error to give refs to fsck, as
> I do not think the use cases for feature justifies the possible confusion
> it may cause.
>
> One possible use case might be when your repository is corrupt, and does
> not pass "git fsck" (without any argument).  In such a case, if you are
> lucky and your disk corrupted objects only reachable from a recent topic
> branch, you might find that this command:
> 
> 	$ git fsck master next ...list other topics here...
> 
> still succeeds, so that you can figure out which topic makes such a
> limited fsck fail when it is listed on the command line, judge its
> importance and resurrect what you can from there, before nuking it to
> bring the repository back in health so that you can recreate the topic.

Does that work? I had the impression from the documentation that the
arguments are purely about the reachability analysis, and that the
actual corruption/correctness checks actually look through the object db
directly, making sure each object is well-formed. Skimming cmd_fsck
seems to confirm that.

-Peff