Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 09:07 UTC
Message-ID: <46DE71BC.5040008@midwinter.com>
In-Reply-To: <86ps0xcwxo.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>

David Kastrup wrote:

> You'll potentially get accumulating unfinished files from
> aborted/killed repack processes.

Which can get cleaned up when the next repack starts. This is no different from unfinished files accumulating from aborted/killed manual repacks.

> If communication fails, you'll get a
> new repack session for every command you start.

Git handles this already:

$ git-gc fatal: unable to create '.git/packed-refs.lock': File exists error: failed to run pack-refs

Presumably in that case you would simply not fire up a new repack.

>   If a repository is used by multiple people...
>

Then the first one will kick off the repack, and subsequent ones won't.

> And so on.  The multiuser aspect makes it a bad idea to do any
> janitorial tasks automatically.  You don't really want every user to
> start a repack at the same time.
>

Quite true, but that's already impossible, so not a problem.

One other thing: The heuristics for this can be such that users who are already regularly running git-gc by hand will see no change in behavior. Their repos will never get to a bad enough state that the automatic git-gc is invoked. Old-timers who run git-gc might, in theory, never even notice a change like this.

-Steve