On Thu, 14 Dec 2006, Shawn Pearce wrote:

But the problem raised is that there are many types of repositories,
and not all should always have reflogs enabled, and its hard to
tell which one should and which shouldn't by default, and its even
worse to force it into a user's ~/.gitconfig as then repositories
which should not have reflogs are getting them anyway.

Thank you for reminding me the reasons why.

However I'd argue that the lack of reflog data is much much worse than 
needlessly having it.

It is therefore much saner to disable it in the config and remove the 
unwanted reflog files than being sorry because it wasn't enabled when 
you would have needed it.

 * Normal working repository (wants reflogs);
 * Bare private (backup) repository (wants reflogs);
 * Bare shared repository (probably doesn't want reflogs);
 * Import generated repository (probably doesn't want reflogs);

And what would be the actual problem if reflog was enabled (i.e. was not 
explicitly disabled if enabled by default) in those last two cases?

Find a way to make git-init-db know the difference magically and 
you'll probably see a patch emerge quickly afterwards.  But right now 
I don't think anyone really has a great solution to the problem.

I'd say screw that.  The solution should really be this patch:

diff --git a/environment.c b/environment.c
index 84d870c..98275b2 100644
--- a/environment.c
+++ b/environment.c

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ int use_legacy_headers = 1;
 int trust_executable_bit = 1;
 int assume_unchanged;
 int prefer_symlink_refs;
-int log_all_ref_updates;
+int log_all_ref_updates = 1;
 int warn_ambiguous_refs = 1;
 int repository_format_version;
 char git_commit_encoding[MAX_ENCODING_LENGTH] = "utf-8";

I know Junio wrote something on this not too long ago (and it was a
good writeup too) but I can never find threads in gmane's archives,
so I'm just going to leave that to someone else...

Well I must have missed it.

But unless there is real harm to have reflog enabled even when you don't 
need it I really think the default should be set to enabled.