# If you have an old checkout, you may have issues updating git and may want to reclone

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/if-you-have-an-old-checkout-you-may-have-issues-updating-git-and-may-want-to-reclone/12100>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [November 22, 2012, 12:16am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/if-you-have-an-old-checkout-you-may-have-issues-updating-git-and-may-want-to-reclone/12100 "2012-11-22T00:16:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2012, 12:16am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/if-you-have-an-old-checkout-you-may-have-issues-updating-git-and-may-want-to-reclone/12100/1 "2012-11-22T00:16:54Z")

</div>

I had to do something a few days to ago to correct some errors in the  
history (I had an invalid email address configured).

The result of this is many of the commits towards the top got  
"rewritten". This means nothing major unless you were trying to  
update a checkout, and if that happens, you may just want to  
work from a clean new checkout.

This also impacted about 5 or 6 pull requests, as what github makes  
available unfortunately has a bit more metadata or something than just  
a basic patch, so it made some things hard  
to apply. I've asked those folks if they can help me out by trying to  
reapply their changes -- which is unfortunate.

Moral of the story is I git does not validate that email addresses are  
RFC compliant and it is very annoying if you have to use  
git-filter-branch 🙂

Sorry for any confusion this caused.

--Michael