Re: git mergetool vs stash apply

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 20, 2008, 12:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20080520124557.GA5873@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <c6c947f60805200532h53e7ec64jb846f1d8c1b7066c@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 04:32:49PM +0400, Alexander Gladysh wrote:

> 1. My repo is 650+ MB, my working copy is 350+ KLOC. That size is hard
> to share. Would that tool reduce it enough? Is it possible to filter
> out irrelevant content somehow?

It doesn't really shrink it very much. You can always filter out some content with filter-branch, but the trick is trying to produce a repo that still exhibits the problem. In your case, it might be enough to simply provide the stashed state and the state upon which you are trying to apply.

> 2. Would that tool obfuscate binaries as well?

It looks at lines, so wherever your binary happened to have a newline, it would get split into chunks. So the answer is yes, it would obfuscate them, but the diffs won't necessarily be meaningful.

All that being said...

> Furthermore, I have tried to reproduce that bug once again (by
> checking out that problematic revision and trying to apply that git
> stash on it) and was unable to (but my repo has changed since that).
> Perhaps it was some "moonphase-related" fluctuation...

Obfuscating your repository to let us reproduce is pointless if you can't reproduce on the repository itself. So I would keep an eye on it, and if it happens again, try to save the broken state.

-Peff