Comments on: On feet and sniper rifles

By: John Carr

John Carr — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:02:08 +0000

@Anonymous Coward: Cool, thats not so bad then. Reading the man pages this has not always been the case (there is a command to fix stale refs, and it mentions pruning is now reflog aware) – any idea when they fixed it?

Also, do you have any ninja jitsu for sifting through the reflog for my missing chunks? (For future reference). I guess git reflog –stat would be a start.. So I could see which entries are related to the files I screwed up.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:30:04 +0000

@John: No, git gc would not remove the history because the reflog still has a reference to it. Only once it expired from the reflog would git gc remove it.

By: John Carr

John Carr — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 20:06:24 +0000

Ah, technically I didn’t lose history (I tried not to say that I had..). I still consider this a shot myself in the foot though.

Essentially i was reviewing the same set of 12 commits over and over again. At some point i did git reset HEAD, made some changes and produced 2 commits from one, but failed to git add some files. I edited the series some more and at some point had to remove some stray header files that were interfering with gtk-doc. Little did I realise that these were the freshly unversioned history. Then i edited some more. All of a sudden, make distcheck on HEAD was failing. I realise my mistake, the headers i just deleted were from a commit i cocked up. ARRRGH.

(There was a secondary cockup that I can’t even explain what happened).

At this point, my tree is small enough and my hacking recent enough that I can reconstruct everything easily, but otherwise its a case of looking through the reflog. It all looks a bit.. “You will be punished for being a noob”.

But I mean, if I’d git gc’d the history would be gone, right? Or if I’d gone over 50 commits I’d have triggered an auto gc and this would be gone. It kind of feels like I’m sifting through the debris that is only still around as a by-product of the original design rather than some desire for you not to loose history….

By: Elijah Newren

Elijah Newren — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:04:58 +0000

Ah, you can’t leave us hanging like that. We want to know what mistake you made.

I’m pretty curious because I find it incredibly difficult in git to lose any recorded history at all. Even when editing history in git, the original version is still around and available via the reflog for a very long time (granted, not everyone knows about the reflog). It is easy to lose data in the working copy that hasn’t been committed yet (git reset –hard, git stash && git stash clear, probably others…), but you said it had to do with history editing.

Fun post, though.