From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:22:28 GMT
Subject: Re: Trying to use git-filter-branch to compress history by removing large, obsolete binary files
Message-ID: <51419b2c0710071722k576c06d9i2f4dce730eae2059@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20071007234346.GA29433@potapov>

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