Re: Trying to use git-filter-branch to compress history by removing large, obsolete binary files

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 8, 2007, 12:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20071008124017.GA22129@potapov>
In-Reply-To: <4709F805.8050704@op5.se>

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 11:27:33AM +0200, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Dmitry Potapov wrote:
> >OTOH, if you want to have a clean repository immediately, I believe
> >'git clone' is a better option. After you made a local clone using
> >it, 'git gc' should remove old garbage.
> >
> 
> A clone only fetches revs reachable from a ref, so pruning immediately
> after a clone is completely pointless.

Not true. git-clone copies the whole pack, so it can contain unreachable objects. Here is a simple script that demonstrates that without garbage collection the size of the cloned repository will be the same as the original one.

=========================================== # Make a small repo mkdir test cd test git init echo hi > there git add there git commit -m 'Small repo'

# Add a random 10M binary file dd if=/dev/urandom of=testme.txt count=10 bs=1M git add testme.txt git commit -m 'Add big binary file'

# Remove the 10M binary file git rm testme.txt git commit -m 'Remove big binary file'

# Compress the repo, see how big the repo is git gc --aggressive --prune du -ks . # 10348 du -ks .git # 10344

git-whatchanged

# Try to rewrite history to remove the binary file git-filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f testme.txt' HEAD git reset --hard

# Remove original refs rm .git/refs/original/refs/heads/master

# Remove back cd ..

# Clone repository git-clone -l test/.git test2

cd test2 du -ks .git # 10360

# Now run garbage collection git gc du -ks .git # 96

===========================================

Dmitry