On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 03:13:48PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > I'm building some tools to track commit objects, and I'm thinking of > using submodule-style references to commit objects in tree objects (mode > 160000) to do so. I'm trying to figure out some of the properties of > that. > > Can a commit object referenced that way live in the same repository, > rather than some external repository? Yes, it can be in the same repository, but... > Will git treat such a reference as keeping the commit object (and > everything recursively referenced by it) live and reachable? If that > commit object is only reachable by the tree, and not by following the > parents of any commit directly referenced from refs/*, will git discard > it as unreachable? No, we do not follow "gitlinks" like this for reachability. Neither for pruning, nor for object transfer via push/fetch. So you'd need to have a separate reference to it (or history containing it). -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