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

From: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org>
Date: Oct 8, 2007, 19:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20071008190514.GM2902@fieldses.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071008163701.GA5868@thunk.org>

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 12:37:01PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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....

Yeah, it's clearly designed with rewriting a whole repo in mind.

It might also be handy, though, as a quick way to rewrite a single branch. (E.g., "add 'Acked-by: Joe' to everything in 'for-upstream' not in 'origin'", or "rename foo to bar in every commit in 'topic' not in 'origin'".).

I find the current defaults awkward for that case. Maybe it'd make sense to treat the two cases differently.

> 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.

Maybe.

--b.