I followed your advice and removed a symlink ref from my repository. But didn't help.. automatic GC has just removed all packs again. May alternates cause such a behavior? Are any ways to make gc log somewhere why it removes packs? On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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