Re: Marking abandoned branches

Jon Smirl [off-list ref] wrote:

On 9/13/06, Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Hi,

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Jon Smirl wrote:

quoted

Moving the refs into refs/abandoned would work too. We would need new
git commands to do this and flags on the visualization tools to
include the abandoned branches. On the other hand doing this is
recording state about the repository in the refs directory instead of
writing this state into the repo itself.

Well, the refs directory is _part_ of the repository. Think about it, if
you do not know which branches are in the object database, you lack a lot
of information.

If you delete all of your heads you can recover them by following all
of the chains in the repo to find them. Doing this would recover the
abandoned branches too but it would mix them up with the active heads.
This is not a big deal but it is info that is getting stored outside
of the object db.

No.  Being able to get a ref back like that is like saying that I
can get files back in ext2 by deleting them then running fsck and
restoring the lost inodes to '/lost+found'.  Sure the data is there
but there's no way to tell which file is which!

The name of a ref, like the name of a file, is pretty important
when it comes to describing it.  Just having the SHA1 ID of 100
commits is pretty useless; it could take weeks to determine which
branch head is which.  The refs database is an important part of
the usability of a Git repository.

-- 
Shawn.