Where the git did that go?

I just came back from Paternity leave in the Eclipse SDK milestone (M3) week. The leave was great. Coming back was, as always, exciting. A slightly misconfigured tool had removed branches and tags (and an aggressive prune/gc had removed commits) during a push to our eclipse.platform.ui repo, leading to Bug 361707 - I have broken the platform-ui git repository. Because tags and commits were gone, we also broke all of the warmup I builds for our M3 week. My apologies to all that suffered.

These are all done by legitimate actions supported by git ... it just turns out that if you have a process backed by a central canonical repository, you really don't want your source disappearing out from under you. "I might have pushed back most of our repo" is not an acceptable level of support :-)

We were able to find a mostly complete repo, disable the Eclipse Foundation commit hook and push back the repo. We are discussing ways to limit this kind of damage in the future. See

• Bug 362076 - Better policy to guard against deleting all branches and tags from our public repos
• Bug 362361 - Better policy ... enforce receive.denyDeletes = true
• Bug 362363 - Better policy ... provide hooks to allow a committer to delete /branchname branches