From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:50:03 GMT
Subject: Re: git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter, still a mistery
Message-ID: <200808070950.23754.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <200808061539.50268.J.Wielemaker@uva.nl>

Jan Wielemaker wrote:
[...]
> 	% git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter packages/chr HEAD
> 
> This indeed creates a nice directory holding only the contents of
> packages/chr.  But, starting qgit I see that all commits, also those
> that had absolutely nothing to do with this dir are still there.

The trick is to rewrite all refs, not just HEAD.  I usually proceed as
follows:

  cp -a repo repo.old  # just to keep a backup
  cd repo
  git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter somedir -- --all

The --all tells it to rewrite as many refs as possible.  Note that the
-- is required.  Also note that refs/original/* will still point to
the old commits, so they won't "just vanish".  You may want to clone
the repository or delete them manually once you are sure the
filter-branch did the right thing.

- Thomas