From: Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil>
Date: Thu, 08 May 2008 21:40:20 GMT
Subject: Re: git gc & deleted branches
Message-ID: <48237344.6070405@nrlssc.navy.mil>
In-Reply-To: <20080508213107.GA1016@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:
> On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 04:23:53PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:
> 
>>> I thought that -A would eventually put them all into a single pack,
>>> killing off the old packs.
>> '-a' puts everything in a single pack and kills off old packs. Anything that
>> was unreachable is not repacked in the new pack.
>>
>> '-A' does the same thing but it also repacks the unreachable objects that were
>> previously packed.
> 
> Ah, indeed. I hadn't looked closely at the -A behavior before. So yes,
> we are never killing off prunable packed objects. Probably we could use
> the same solution as "git prune --expire"; perhaps a
> "--keep-unreachable=2.weeks.ago"?

The 'prune --expire' behavior is based on object mtime (i.e. file modification time).
That is lost once something is packed right?

I was thinking that either repack or pack-objects could be modified to unpack those
unreachable objects and leave them loose, and also give them the timestamp of the
pack file they came from. Then the --expire behavior of git-prune could work normally
and remove them. This seems like it would work nicely since prune follows repack in
git-gc.

-brandon