On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 04:13:03PM +0100, Dmitry Neverov wrote: > I'm using git p4 for synchronization with perforce. Sometimes after 'git > p4 rebase' git starts a garbage collection. When gc finishes a local > repository contains no pack files only loose objects, so I have to > re-import repository from perforce. It also doesn't contain a temporary > pack git gc was creating. It sounds like git didn't find any refs; it will pack only objects which are reachable. Unreachable objects are either: 1. Exploded into loose objects if the mtime on the pack they contain is less than 2 weeks old (and will eventually expire when they become 2 weeks old). 2. Dropped completely if older than 2 weeks. > One more thing about my setup: since git p4 promotes a use of a linear > history I use a separate repository for another branch in perforce. In > order to be able to cherry-pick between repositories I added this > another repo objects dir as an alternate and also added a ref which is a > symbolic link to a branch in another repo (so I don't have to do any > fetches). You can't symlink refs like this. The loose refs in the filesystem may be migrated into the "packed-refs" file, at which point your symlink will be broken. That is a likely reason why git would not find any refs. So your setup will not ever work reliably. But IMHO, it is a bug that git does not notice the broken symlink and abort an operation which is computing reachability in order to drop objects. As you noticed, it means a misconfiguration or filesystem error results in data loss. -Peff -- 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