On Friday, December 21, 2012 06:41:43 pm Earl Gresh wrote: > Hi- > > I have observed that after running GC, one particular git > repository ended up with some missing refs in the > refs/changes/* namespace the Gerrit uses for storing > patch sets. The refs were valid and should not have been > pruned. Concerned about loosing data, GC is still enabled > but ref packing is turned off. Now the number of refs has > grown to the point that it's causing performance problems > when cloning the project. > > Is anyone familiar with git gc deleting valid references? > I'm running git version 1.7.8. Have there been any > patches in later git releases that might address this > issue ( if it is a git problem )? When Earl was testing ref-packing a few months ago, that the refs in question where reported invalid by git show-ref: git show-ref 2>&1 |grep refs/changes/45/129345/1 error: refs/changes/45/129345/1 does not point to a valid object! But we could trace the refs manually to git show-object just fine. But oddly enough, when using git show-ref with the -v, the error above would not be spit out. So, my guess is that something during the repack was following the same code path that git show-ref (without the - v) was following and determining that the ref was invalid and therefor it was not able to add it to the new packfile, but yet perhaps it was still being added to the prune-list and thus getting pruned? Is this possible somehow? Looking at handle_one_ref() I can't see how. The fprintf() happens before the ref is added to the prune list and is unconditional. I am grasping here, but what if the sha1 passed into handle_one_ref() somehow gets set incorrectly to 000...? Would it then basically get written to the packed- ref file as 000... (deleted), but then still get added to the prune list? You might say "but then it wouldn't get pruned since the loose ref doesn't match 000..., but if the logic which checks this matching makes the same error reading the sha1 and thinks it is 000... it might then get pruned? -Martin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html