Mastodawn

Julia Evans May 16, 2024

in git, what ways are there to "lose" a commit in a way that you CAN'T recover using the reflog (so that you need to iterate over every single commit in the repository if you want to find it?

The only ways I know (using git's normal tools) are:

* using `git stash drop` or `git stash pop` to drop a stashed commit
* waiting 90+ days to try to recover the commit (so that it expires from the reflog)
* explicitly deleting the reflog in some way (rm -rf .git, git reflog expire, etc)

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Julia Evans May 16, 2024

also: have you even run into a situation where git *completely deleted* a commit that you needed? (where it wasn't recoverable with the reflog or with `git fsck`)

only interested in things that have *actually happened to you*, not "this could theoretically happen if…”

I'm trying to think about whether there's any normal way for that to happen except if you completely delete your git repository.

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David Ferguson

@b0rk convoluted, but we have to be careful of this in enterprise: if you cloned with --reference and were on a branch that got deleted or orphaned from within that reference AND someone ran gc in the reference that finally deleted the objects, your repo has lost commits (and is unrecoverable)