Re: Trying to use git-filter-branch to compress history by removing large, obsolete binary files

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 8, 2007, 00:22 UTC
Message-ID: <51419b2c0710071722k576c06d9i2f4dce730eae2059@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20071007234346.GA29433@potapov>

On 10/7/07, Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 04:24:49PM -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > $ git reflog expire --all
> > $ git gc --aggressive --prune
>
> I believe this should work:
>
> git reflog expire --all --expire-unreachable=0
> git gc --prune

Yes, this seems to work.  So the history-rewriting steps are

git-filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f testme.txt' HEAD git reset --hard rm -rf .git/refs/original/ vi .git/packed-refs # Use vi to remove the line referring to refs/original... git reflog expire --all --expire-unreachable=0 git gc --prune

Seems like a wrapper is needed.  :-)

> Warning: all unreachable references will be removed!

What other scenarios could lead to unreachable references? I don't know how to determine whether this is safe or not (except that these were test repositories anyway, so I don't care what happens to them).

Thanks! Elijah