Using git for file archival/backup purposes - deletion strategy

Hi list!

I am drafting a tool to use GIT as a behind-the-scenes archival/backup tool for web applications. There's been countless threads covering generic file archival, discussing /etc and homedirs, so I am pretty comfortable with the mechanics and the whole idea. This is a fairly narrow use, where the web apps are reasonable well behaved -- most (all?) of the caveats in ~ and /etc archival seem to be under control.

What I am not 100% clear on is the "old history" deletion strategy. The history will be *strictly* linear, so my intention is to keep the last N commits, by overriding the parent of the Nth commit that git log lists with a "shallow" entry in $GIT_DIR/shallow as documented in Documentation/technical/shallow.txt , and call gc after that.

Is that the correct way to "forget" old history? Searching high and low in the list, I fail to find a definitive answer. Shallow and grafts entries are discussed as ways of doing this, but I can't find a "correct" way of doing this.

BTW I've just done a git clone --depth 10 ~/src/git and while I do get a clearly "shallow" checkout, with a tiny .git/objects directory, I can't find any file called shallow, or grafts. .git/config doesn't say anything either, and alternates is empty. I frankly cannot tell how git recognizes it as a shallow repo.

Ah! Local clones won't honour --depth!. A clone from git.kernel.org does get its .git/shallow file.

So the question is: is it safe (and enough) to add the SHA1 to the .git/shallow file and call git gc? Is there a better way?

cheers,

m