Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: Jing Xue <jingxue@digizenstudio.com>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 17:55 UTC
Message-ID: <20070905135549.b5k3etn94wos4g4o@intranet.digizenstudio.com>
In-Reply-To: <87ir6pc9n1.wl%cworth@cworth.org>

Quoting Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>:

Show 12 quoted lines

> I don't think the warning message alone is a good fix. I think the
> people who would understand the warning and appreciate that they could
> then take care of repacking as convenient are the same people that
> already understand the repacking concept, and are likely already
> repacking occasionally, (so would likely never see the warning).
>
> But the problematic case is the user who knows nothing of the
> issue. And in that case, giving this warning isn't useful education,
> it's just forcing the user to learn more and do more work. "If git
> notices it has too many 'loose object' and 'git gc' would fix the
> problem, then why didn't it do that itself? And what the heck is a
> 'loose object' anyway?"

(my 2 cents as another ordinary new git user) Hmm, not necessarily. That a system knows what the best action is doesn't meant that _right now_ is the best time to take that action. One subtle difference I think between git's gc and Java/python/etc.'s gc is that in the latter case it is, at least metaphorically, a life and death situation - if gc isn't run, the application will run out of memory, where as in git, it's more of a performance degradation issue, which, sort of, can wait.

On the issue of implementation awareness, a warning message saying something along the lines of "your repository is getting slower. You might want to consider running 'git gc', and remember to do that from time to time." is not much different from "your file system is getting slower. You might want to consider running <whatever-defrag-tool>, and remember to do that from time to time."

Neither these messages nor the actions they propose _require_ users to learn what "repacking", "loose object", or "file fragments" are about before they can proceed.

Cheers.

-- 
Jing Xue