Hi Junio, On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > That sounds reasonable. And if they *do* end up taking any time to > > traverse, it's because they weren't reachable from other anchoring > > points, so taking the extra time to traverse them seems fine. > > The only thing that is hard is to clearly define _what_ are the new > anchoring points. > > It cannot be "anything directly under .git that has all-caps name > that ends with _HEAD". The ones we write we know are going to be > removed at some point in time (e.g. "git reset", "git bisect reset", > "git merge --abort", etc.). We do not have any control on random > ones that the users and third-party tools leave behind, holding onto > irrelevant objects forever. Please note that bisect already uses the (transient) refs/bisect/ namespace. So I do not think we need to take specific care of the BISECT_* files. If we had thought of it back then, we could have used such a transient namespace also for FETCH_HEAD, CHERRY_PICK_HEAD and also for detached HEADs (which we should have called "unnamed branches"). Now, how about special-casing *just* these legacy files in gc: HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD and CHERRY_PICK_HEAD? Any new transient refs should live in the refs/ namespace, which is already handled. BTW this issue is getting much more problematic when you have a lot of worktrees, some of which operate on detached HEADs. Which I do. Ciao, Dscho -- 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