From: Ryan Anderson <ryan@michonline.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 20:48:51 GMT
Subject: Re: [QUESTION] about .git/info/grafts file
Message-ID: <20060120204851.GB19212@mythryan2.michonline.com>
In-Reply-To: <43CF97AF.9060300@op5.se>

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 02:44:15PM +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> The full kernel tree, with history since 1991 or some such, is about 3.2 
> GB. It was for this reason that the early history was dropped. I don't 
> think another drop will be necessary any time soon, since incremental 
> updates are fairly cheap over git and git+ssh. Only gitk suffers, but 
> that's just for a short while.

Just to make sure this is corrected, the 3.2GB was for a fully unpacked
tree, which is still fairly bad in the current tree.

The historical tree, packed, runs about 266M in a single pack.
Admittedly, I still refuse to try to run gitk on it.

> >But I'm not saying that it's bad thing to keep
> >that history. It just would be nice to allow developpers that don't
> >care about old history to get rid of it.
> 
> You could ofcourse create a new repository with the files from the 
> version you want, but then you'd have a hard time merging the two repos 
> if you ever want to import the old history.

It's always possible to use a "graft" to tie the history together, and
if you really need to merge changes across the boundary, my graft-ripple
(in the archives) tool can make it happen, though it does some ... nasty
things to the history tree in the process.  (It might be useful on a
throwaway tree to provide a way to merge, then, from which a set of
diffs could be taken and applied back on an un-messy tree.)

-- 

Ryan Anderson
  sometimes Pug Majere