如何保护大量孤立的 Git 提交？

Question

I am using Git to keep track of machine learning experiments. My workflow is to save the Git hash with the experiment results, so I have a pointer to the exact code that produced those results. The problem is that almost none of the commits associated with experiments will end up in a real branch, since most ideas turn out not to work well. These commits end up orphaned according to Git, but I would like to make sure I can still check out the code for each historical experiment via its Git hash. These orphaned commits are vulnerable to garbage collection via git prune and possibly other mechanisms.

My question is: how can I make sure orphaned commits are not inadvertently deleted? If it is not possible, are there other Git commands that are dangerous? I know I can create a branch or tag for each of the orphaned commits, but at this point there are too many to do so manually, and in any case I'd prefer not to clutter my actual branches/tags.

Answer 1

You can set gc.pruneExpire to never . This is indiscriminate and will cause your repository size to bloat.

Don't do this. Use tags . I know you don't want to, but relying on orphaned commits is very fragile. Tagging is simpler, safer, and doesn't bloat your repository. Tags can be pushed to a remote repository so you have a backup.

To mitigate clutter give them all a prefix like experiment/1 , experiment/2 .