Git stashes in colocated jj/git repo

[PaulMorris]

Hi, I've been using jj in a pre-existing git repo (by running jj git init --colocate) for about a month. It's been great so far, but I realized I had previously saved some unfinished work in git stashes. Now when I run git stash list there are no stashes in the repo.

I tried running git reflog to try to find the stashes (following a tutorial about recovering lost stashes), but I don't see any stashes in the git reflog either. The oldest entry that appears when I run git reflog is the first one after I started using jj (with jj git init --colocate ).

I created a test git repo, made a stash, then ran jj git init --colocate , and I can still see the stash (in the git reflog and when I run git stash list).

Have my stashes perhaps been garbage collected by git? (I read that two weeks is the default amount of time before git garbage collection kicks in.)

Are there other ways to try to recover stashes?

Should users expect their git stashes to still be available, indefinitely, after colocating a jj repo with a git repo?

(I should have made a back up copy of my repo before using jj and/or used branches instead of stashes.)

[arxanas]

I don't think we expect jj to have any impact on Git stashes.

• Normally, Git stashes are referenced by refs/stash (docs), and therefore shouldn't be eligible for garbage collection in any event (regardless of the two-week limit).
• IIUC jj's impact on Git GC is primarily to add references (to items visible in the operation log), rather than remove references.

If you want to run a test GC, you could run git gc --prune=now or jj util gc --expire=now.

[martinvonz]

And git gc isn't supposed to delete old stashes either. As you may know, Git stashes are implemented by recording them in the reflog of refs/stash, so you might think that they would eventually get garbage collected like other old refs. However, Git apparently treats refs/stash differently when it comes to GC. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26190837/how-many-how-long-are-stashes-saved-by-git

[PaulMorris]

Okay, thanks for the quick response. It makes sense -- jj would not have any affect on git stashes, so they would still remain ineligible for garbage collection by git.

It turns out this was a user error situation and I was mistaken about having the missing files in git stashes. Looking back through the logs I remembered that when I ran jj git init --colocate I had a number of untracked directories and files (that were not in stashes like I usually do). I didn't want some of these to become tracked, so unwisely I ran jj undo but that meant the files didn't go back to being untracked, rather they disappeared from the current state of the repo and I didn't notice what had happened to them. I've now successfully recovered them and all is well.

So in the future I will first move any untracked files that I don't want to be tracked out of a repo before running jj git init --colocate. Thanks again, I am really liking jj.