what would you call a git commit that can no longer be reached from any branch or reference (for example because you ran git commit --amend or git rebase), but that you can still get to from git reflog?
I've considered "orphan", "dangling", and "unreachable" but none of these seem right:
orphan has another meaning in git
dangling only refers to the "tip" commits
"unreachable" means that you can't reach it at all
would love a term that's already used, I don't like inventing terms
@shana i also want to talk about some of that commit's parent commit(s), if they’re not in the history of any branch/reference either. not just the one that's the tip.
@b0rk@shana I don't think it's correct to say "dangling only refers to the 'tip' commits". All commits are "tip commits" at some point; no commit is special in that regard, particularly when you remove references. How would you define such a thing? "This dangling commit is not a tip because some other dangling commit refers to it as its parent"? Ludicrous and unsupportable, imo.
@b0rk I call them unreachable because that's what git-fsck defines the term as (“objects that exist but that aren’t reachable from any of the reference nodes”) and I don't have a strong enough opinion to want to maintain a mental mapping for a different term.
people often use the term "orphan commit" to refer to a dangling/unreachable commit. git's source code even uses the term that way
people also use "orphan commit" to refer to a commit without a parent
people use "orphan branch" to mean either a branch that doesn't have any commits on it yet, or a branch which has a different root commit from your main branch
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