On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 05:39:27PM +0100, Michael Haggerty wrote: > > 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. > > There's a bunch of code in refs.c that is there explicitly for reading > loose references that are symlinks. If the link contents literally start > with "refs/", then they are read and treated as a symbolic ref. > Otherwise, the symlink is just followed. Right, but we should be able to notice that: 1. We found a symlink. 2. We couldn't read it its ref value (because it's a broken link). I think we _do_ notice that at the lowest level, and set REF_ISBROKEN. But the problem is that the reachability code in prune and in pack-objects (triggered by "repack -ad") uses for_each_ref, and not for_each_rawref. So they ignore "broken" refs rather than complaining, even though failing to read a ref may mean we could drop objects which were only mentioned by that ref. > It is still possible to write symbolic refs that are represented as > symlinks (see core.preferSymlinkRefs), but that backwards-compatibility > code was added in 2006(!) Maybe it's time to deprecate it. And maybe we > should start working towards a future where any symlinks under "refs" > cause git to complain. I wouldn't mind seeing all of the symlink code go away, but I think it is orthogonal to the problem I mentioned. -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