How to create reflogs information in an existing bare repository

Question

As you might have known that by default, git doesn't enable reflog updates for new bare repositories. The problem is, I have a long history repository but it was created before I set the flag "logAllRefUpdates" on, and now I want that information for another application to work.

How can I achieve that with minimal changes made to the existing repository. A very simple solution is pushing a new commit which I don't want to (!) :-)

Answer 1

The reflog is a relatively simple file format. Here's an example:

] cat .git/logs/HEAD|sed 's/\t/<TAB>/'
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 5cfe4256d98af22a570c78c5e3048391a90f5f98 Joe User <[email protected]> 1306427954 -0400<TAB>clone: from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git

You can manually construct appropriate reflogs by following the same format:

previous-ref-or-zero new-ref User Name <user@email> unix-timestamp timezone\tmessage

Just create one of these for each ref. You can probably do this directly with git for-each-ref with an appropriate format string (thanks, Chris!)