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

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 8, 2007, 16:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20071008163701.GA5868@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071008143650.GC2902@fieldses.org>

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 10:36:50AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

> Having it by default leave these backups around, even when everything
> succeeds, makes for unnecessary cleanup work in the normal case, and is
> inconsistent with the behavior of other git commands that destroy or
> rewrite history.

I think what makes git-filter-branch different is that you can change a large amount of history with git-filter-branch, including large numbers of tags, etc. The reflog is quite sufficient to recover from a screwed up "git commit --amend". But I don't think the reflog is going to be sufficient given the kinds of changes that git-filter-branch can potentially do to your repository. Maybe default of --backup vs --no-backup could be changed via a config parameter, but I think the default is of backing up refs is a good think....

Perhaps a solution would be to add "git-filter-branch --cleanup" that that clears the reflog and wipes the backed up tags; perhaps first asking interactively if the user is really sure he/she wants to do this.

						- Ted