Git-clean is not safe when there is a submodule tracked in a local branch that
is not tracked in the mainline branch. Running git-clean from the mainline
branch when we have unpushed changes in a submodule tracked only in a local
branch can lose local changes to that submodule permanentely.
I have accidentally lost changes in this way when working with very
large projects where a git-clean is more reliable than a makefile's
"make clean".
By changing the default behavior of git-clean to not delete the .git
directories allows the history of the submodules to be recovered.
# Example of issue:
#
# Clone mainline project
git clone git://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip.git
cd paperclip/
# Add a submodule not tracked by mainline
git checkout -b test_submodule_clean
git submodule add git://github.com/technoweenie/attachment_fu.git attachement_fu
git commit -m "add submodule"
# Make a modification to the submodule. Note that we haven't pushed the change
cd attachement_fu/
git checkout -b mod_readme_in_submodule
vi README
git add README
git commit -m "Small change in submodule"
# Go back to mainline's master branch and do a clean
cd ..
git checkout master
git clean -f -d
# Our change to the submodule, that was never pushed, is now gone forever
# because all the history stored in the submodule's .git direct is deleted.
# There is no recovering from this.
# This breaks the "git must be safe" rule, as we've lost potentially a lot of
# changes to any submodule projects that didn't get pushed yet. Solve
# this issue by not deleting any .git directories we come across during a
# git-clean, unless the "-m" option is passed to git-clean.
This is my first email submittal using git, so apologies in advance for any
formatting issues
Jason Holden (2):
Add option to not delete a .git directory in remove_dir_recursively()
Don't clean any untracked submodule's .git dir by default in
git-clean
Documentation/git-clean.txt | 6 +++++-
builtin-clean.c | 15 +++++++++++++--
builtin-clone.c | 4 ++--
dir.c | 17 +++++++++++++++--
dir.h | 2 +-
refs.c | 2 +-
transport.c | 4 ++--
7 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
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