Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 07:30 UTC
Message-ID: <7vsl5tk1r8.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0709042355030.19879@evo.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> I personally repack everything way more often than is necessary, and I had 
> kind of assumed that people did it that way, but I was apparently wrong. 
> Comments?

I am as old timer as you are so I am not qualified to add much variety to the discussion, but I agree that excessive cruft is something we should warn the user about.

I personally was _extremely_ annoyed by git-cvsimport occassionary deciding to repack whenever it finds more than certain number of loose objects, not because it is a big import, but because I happened to start the command to start a very small import after doing my own development for a while to accumulate loose objects, and I really hate automatic repacking for any operation (or tool that thinks it knows better than I do in general).

Perhaps _exiting_ "git-commit" and "git-fetch" before doing anything, when the repository has more than 5000 loose objects with a LOUD bang that instructs an immediate repack would be good?

I really do not like the idea of automatically running a repack after first interrupting the original command and then resuming. For one thing it would make a horribly difficult situation to debug if anything goes wrong. You cannot reproduce such a situation easily.