Question

I’ve got a Git repository with plenty of commits that are under no particular branch, I can git show them, but when I try to list branches that contain them, it reports back nothing.

I thought this is the dangling commits/tree issue (as a result of -D branch), so I pruned the repo, but I still see the same behavior after that:

$ git fetch origin

$ git fsck --unreachable
$ git fsck

No output, nothing dangling (right?). But the commit exists

$ git show 793db7f272ba4bbdd1e32f14410a52a412667042
commit 793db7f272ba4bbdd1e32f14410a52a412667042
Author: ...

and it is not reachable through any branch as

$ git branch --contains 793db7f272ba4bbdd1e32f14410a52a412667042

gives no output.

What exactly is the state of that commit? How can I list all commits in a similar state? How can I delete commits like those?

Answer 1

No output, nothing dangling (right?)

Note that commits referred to from your reflog are considered reachable.

What exactly is the state of that commit? How can I list all commits with similar state

Pass --no-reflogs to convince git fsck to show them to you.

How can I delete commits like those?

Once your reflog entries are expired, those objects will then also be cleaned up by git gc.

Expiry is regulated by the gc.pruneexpire, gc.reflogexpire, and gc.reflogexpireunreachable settings. Cf. git help config.

The defaults are all quite reasonable.