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

From: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 17:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20070905174427.GC13314@fieldses.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0709042355030.19879@evo.linux-foundation.org>

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 12:09:27AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> I personally repack everything way more often than is necessary, and I had 
> kind of assumed that people did it that way, but I was apparently wrong. 
> Comments?

Well, this may just prove I'm an idiot, but one of the reasons I rarely run it is that I have trouble remembering exactly what it does; in particular,

	- does it prune anything that might be needed by a repo I
	  cloned with -s?
	- is there anything that's unsafe to do while the git-gc is
	  running?
	- what are the implications for http users if this is a public
	  repo?
	- is git-gc enough on its own or should I be running something
	  more agressive ocassionally too?

No doubt they all have simple answers, which probably amount to "just don't worry about it", and which I could have found in less time than it'd take to write this email. But when I've got other work to do, reading "man git-gc" is just enough effort for me to postpone the whole thing to another day.

So, anyway, your message reminded me to run git-gc on my main working repo. At which point one of my personal scripts immediately started failing--it was assuming it could find any ref under .git/refs/, and I hadn't realized (or maybe I had once, and I'd forgotten) that git-gc packs refs by default now.

Bah.  I don't know what the moral of that story is.

--b.