Re: [PATCH] git-am: Run git gc only once and not for every patch.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 4, 2008, 20:38 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhchtjphk.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801041437190.2649@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, Michael Stefaniuc wrote:
>
>> With "too many unreachable loose objects" git gc --auto will always
>> trigger. This clutters the output of git am and thus git rebase.
>> 
>> The work flow of the Wine project doesn't include git merge. git rebase
>> is therefor used to track the origin. This will produce soon too many
>> loose objects for git gc --auto's taste. Pruning the repository would
>> "fix" it. But we tell Wine developers new to git to NOT prune as long as
>> they aren't confident enough with git; just as a safety net in case they
>> have thrown away month of work.
>
> The safety is the reflog.  What it refers to doesn't get pruned.

What Nico said.

More importantly, ones who are not confident with git would not be able to resurrect unreachables that are left unpruned anyway. The unreachables are by definition not connected to anything, so they cannot do much better than grepping through droppings left by "fsck --lost-found", which they probably even do not know how to do yet.