From: Hin-Tak Leung <hintak.leung@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:25:12 GMT
Subject: git gc expanding packed data?
Message-ID: <3ace41890908041325v24ed9e2eh95ecc148305f7775@mail.gmail.com>

I cloned gcc's git about a week ago to work on some problems I have
with gcc on minor platforms, just plain 'git clone
git://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git gcc' .and ran gcc fetch about daily, and
'git rebase origin' from time to time. I don't have local changes,
just following and monitoring what's going on in gcc. So after a week,
I thought I'd do a git gc . Then it goes very bizarre.

Before I start 'git gc', .The whole of .git was about 700MB and
git/objects/pack was a bit under 600MB, with a few other directories
under .git/objects at 10's of K's and a few 30000-40000K's, and the
checkout was, well, the size of gcc source code. But after I started
git gc, the message stays in the 'counting objects' at about 900,000
for a long time, while a lot of directories under .git/objects/ gets a
bit large, and .git blows up to at least 7GB with a lot of small files
under .git/objects/*/, before seeing as I will run out of disk space,
I kill the whole lot and ran git clone again, since I don't have any
local change and there is nothing to lose.

I am running git version 1.6.2.5 (fedora 11). Is there any reason why
'git gc' does that?