Re: [PATCH 1/3] retain reflogs for deleted refs

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 03:36:09PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > Only one test needed to be updated; t7701 tries to create
> > unreachable objects by deleting branches. Of course that no
> > longer works, which is the intent of this patch. The test
> > now works around it by removing the graveyard logs.
> 
> I think the work-around indicates the need for regular users to be
> able to also discover, prune and delete these logs.  Do we have
> "prune reflog for _this_ ref (or these refs), removing entries that
> are older than this threshold"?  If so the codepath would need to
> know about the graveyard and the implementation detail of the tilde
> suffix so that the end users do not need to know about them.

We do have it: "git reflog expire --expire=now deleted-branch" is the
right way to do it. Unfortunately, it does not work with my patch. The
dwim_log correctly notes that a reflog exists (because it checks that
the "graveyard" version of the ref exists), but then expire_reflog does
not correctly fallback when opening the log (it usually has to do the
_reverse_ translation, because it gets the graveyard log name from
for_each_reflog, and has to find the correct lock).

I'll fix it in my re-roll, and then have t7701 use it.

> I like the general direction.  Perhaps a long distant future
> direction could be to also use the same trick in the ref namespace
> so that we can have 'next' branch itself, and 'next/foo', 'next/bar'
> forks that are based on the 'next' branch at the same time (it
> obviously is a totally unrelated topic)?

I would love that, as it would mean we could simply leave the reflogs in
place without having a separate graveyard namespace. Which means there
wouldn't need to be any reflog-specific translation at all, and bugs
like the one above wouldn't exist.

But it would mean that you cannot naively run

  echo $sha1 >.git/refs/heads/foo

anymore. I suspect that the packed-refs conversion rooted out many
scripts that did not use update-ref and rev-parse to access refs, but
the above does still work today. So I suspect there would be some
fallout. Not to mention that older versions of git would be completely
broken, which would mean we need a lengthy deprecation period while
everybody upgrades to versions of git that support the reading side.

-Peff