From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 20:56:53 GMT
Subject: Re: git gc & deleted branches
Message-ID: <20080508205652.GB32762@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <48235D99.2040407@nrlssc.navy.mil>

On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 03:07:53PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

> btw, this is _really_ a non-issue. It seems to keep coming up on the list.
> 
> Just know that each one of the config options that you set to zero, including
> the one Jeff suggested setting to "now", is a safety mechanism that is there
> to ensure that you never ever lose data and that mistakes are recoverable.

Yes, I want to chime in since I have been giving advice in such threads:
Please don't construe my help as any sort of endorsement of this
behavior. Git tries hard not to lose your data, and it is almost always
a bad idea to try to override these safety checks unless you really know
what you are doing.

And even then, try to consider balancing a bit of freed disk space (and
generally _no_ performance gain, because git is very good about not
looking at objects that aren't necessary to the current operation)
versus thinking "oops, I wish I still had that data" in a few days.

I can think offhand of only one time when it was truly useful for me to
prune aggressively, and it was a very special case: a pathologically
large repo for which I was doing a one-shot conversion from another
format (and I wanted to prune failed attempts).

-Peff