Mirror clone "does not look like a fresh clone" because of stashes?

[Rhys-T]

I was trying to clean up something that accidentally got committed to a local repo. I used git clone --mirror --no-local to make a clean copy, cd'd into it, and tried running git-filter-repo --sdr --replace-text ../replace-text.txt, and got this:

Aborting: Refusing to destructively overwrite repo history since
this does not look like a fresh clone.
  (has stashed changes)
Note: when cloning local repositories, you need to pass
      --no-local to git clone to avoid this issue.
Please operate on a fresh clone instead.  If you want to proceed
anyway, use --force.

even though it is a fresh clone. The original repo does have some stashes in it. They don't seem to fully exist in the mirror - there's no refs/stash (EDIT: see #652 (comment)) or logs/refs/stash - but some of the underlying commits did get copied over.

How does git-filter-repo know about the stashes, and what should I do about this error? According to the "DESCRIPTION" section of the manual, it's supposed to be able to rewrite stashes by default, but I don't see any specifics on how to go about that safely. --force seems like the wrong option, since the stash ref isn't there…?

(Apologies if I missed any obvious documentation about this anywhere.)

[Rhys-T]

Worked around it for now by changing all the stashes into branches before cloning:

git stash list | nl -ba | while read idx line; do
  ref=${line%%:*}                     # “stash@{0}”, “stash@{1}”, etc.
  git branch "old-stashes/${idx}" "$ref"
done
git stash clear

[newren]

Yeah, now that filter-repo natively supports stashes, we shouldn't need to throw a warning when users have them around. We should remove that particular check from the fresh-clone checks.

[Rhys-T]

Forgot to go back and update this, but it turns out that the stash ref was there - it was just stored in the packed-refs file, which I didn't know about at the time. The older stashes, though, are only pointed to by the reflog for the stash ref, and that doesn't get copied over during a clone, meaning that the corresponding commits also don't make it into the clone.