Verifying the whole repository

["Alex Bennee" <kernel-hacker@bennee.com>]

Hi,

While I was debugging a crash in parsecvs while converting our CVS
repository I discovered it was because one of the CVS files had become
corrupted (truncated). This is a problem I've had before with RCS
based files which are prone to silent corruption that you won't notice
until you try and checkout an old revision of the file.

As git is fundamentally hash based it's a lot easier to determine the
health of the repository but I wonder if it's possible for silent
corruption to creep in which won't be noticed until you try and
checkout a historical commit of the tree. I notice there is a
git-verify-pack command that checks the pack files are OK. Do any of
the other commands implicitly ensure all objects in the repo are
correct and valid? git-gc?

Are there any other parts of the .git metadata that are crucial or is
it enough to say if all objects and packs match their hashes you have
all the information you may need to recover an arbitrary revision of
the repo?

-- 
Alex, homepage: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/