Re: Using git for file archival/backup purposes - deletion strategy

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: Dec 27, 2007, 09:18 UTC
Message-ID: <47736DE5.40509@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90712261443t6aa0cd76u46d8ae88fc7c1eba@mail.gmail.com>

Martin Langhoff schrieb:

Show 10 quoted lines

> 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.

I'm doing something like this. Basically:

   git rev-parse "HEAD~$N" > .git/info/grafts
   git filter-branch -f HEAD

If you omit filter-branch, then a repack -a -d will corrupt the repository (I think) unless you keep the grafts file with it and in all its clones forever.

-- Hannes