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

From: Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 18:14 UTC
Message-ID: <46DEF1FA.4050500@midwinter.com>
In-Reply-To: <87odgh0zn6.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix>

Nix wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Indeed. I repack all our git trees in the middle of the night, and our
> incremental backup script drops .keep files corresponding to every
> existing pack before running the backup.
>
> This is probably a good job for cron :)
>

If you are setting up cron jobs to repack multiple git trees, you are not the kind of novice or casual git user who this proposal would primarily be aimed at.

But in any event, since you are doing that, your repos will never accumulate a high enough percentage of loose objects (whatever the threshold is) to trigger the warning and/or automatic launch. So you can continue to operate as before, no difference in behavior, while people who don't know how / want to set up cron jobs will have their repositories cleaned too.

git-gc can leave behind a "last completed" timestamp and we can suppress the check for excess loose objects until some minimum amount of time has passed since last git-gc. If that amount is greater than the interval between your cron jobs, you won't even get any (measurable) overhead from the detection to see if the warning is needed.

-Steve