Re: dangling commits and blobs: is this normal?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 22, 2009, 19:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20090422190856.GB13424@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <vpqws9cd06b.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 08:15:56PM +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:
> 
> > Why so?  Having fewer packs is always a good thing.  Having only one 
> > pack is of course the optimal situation. 
> 
> Good and optimal wrt Git, but not wrt an incremental backup system for
> example. I have a "git gc" running daily in a cron job in each of my
> repositories, but to be nice with my sysadmin, I don't want to rewrite
> tens of megabytes of data each night just because I commited a 2 lines
> patch somewhere.

You can mark your "big" pack with a .keep, then do your nightly gc as usual. You'll have a smaller pack being rewritten each night. When it gets big enough, drop the .keep, gc, and then .keep the new pack.

Yes, it's a bit more work for you, but having "git gc" optimize by default for git's performance seems to be the only sensible course. Your idea of what is "big enough" above is somewhat outside the realm of git, so you have to pay the price to specify it by tweaking the keep-files.

-Peff