Re: [PATCH] reflog expire --stale-fix: be generous about missing objects

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
writes:

> From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
>
> Whenever a user runs `git reflog expire --stale-fix`, the most likely
> reason is that their repository is at least _somewhat_ corrupt. Which
> means that it is more than just possible that some objects are missing.
>
> If that is the case, that can currently let the command abort through
> the phase where it tries to mark all reachable objects.
>
> Instead of adding insult to injury, let's be gentle and continue as best
> as we can in such a scenario, simply by ignoring the missing objects and
> moving on.
>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
> ---

I am of two minds.

I appreciate an effort of making it looser and less likely to get in
trouble when running in a corrupt repository, but --stale-fix is a
bit special and should probably be removed.

The only reason the option was added was because we needed to have
an easy way to recover from a specific kind of reflog corruption
that would have resulted by a (then known) bug in "git reflog" in
the released version of Git that came immediately before the version
of Git that added the "fix" option, while the root cause of the
corruption got fixed.  

Back when 1389d9dd (reflog expire --fix-stale, 2007-01-06) was
written, it was very useful to have a way to recover from the
corruption likely to have happened with the version of Git that came
before it.  But it no longer is relevant after this many years.
There may be other ways to break the reflog entries, but --stale-fix
was never designed to deal with anything but a specific way the
reflog gets corrupted (namely, by the old version of Git that
corrupted reflog in a specific way), so keeping it would not be very
useful.