Re: [PATCH 2/2] git-gc: skip stashes when expiring reflogs

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2008, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

> Yes, we shouldn't _encourage_ people to use stashes as a long-term storage
> mechanism, but neither should we allow old stashes to silently disappear as a
> result of reflog expiry, especially as part of automatic garbage collection.
> There are two reasons:
> 
> (1) Normal reflogs accumulate cruft automatically through normal use and if
> not cleaned up they'll just grow and grow and grow. On the other hand, for
> "git stash" to accumulate cruft over the long term the user actually has to
> take action and _abuse_ them. Abuse is less likely because it requires this
> conscious action, and as the output of "git stash list" gets bigger and more
> unwieldy this will serve to encourage people to clean out their stashes
> themselves, or not let the list grow out of control in the first place. In
> other words, the size of the stash reflog is unlikely to be a problem.
> 
> (2) Automatically expiring normal reflogs is a service to the user, because
> it's cleaning up something that is automatically generated. Stashes are the
> result of a concious user decision to create them, so automatically "cleaning
> them up" is _not_ going to help the user.
> 
> So yes, branches _are_ better and more appropriate for long term storage than
> stashes, but even so I don't think it's right for us to risk throwing away
> information that the user explicitly stashed and expected Git to look after
> for them.

Fair enough.


Nicolas