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

From: Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
Date: Sep 5, 2007, 18:28 UTC
Message-ID: <873axt0xxe.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix>
In-Reply-To: <46DEE8E8.2000801@midwinter.com>

On 5 Sep 2007, Steven Grimm stated:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Govind Salinas wrote:
>> This is one reason why I really think that gc should be *plumbing*
>> and *not* porcelain.
>
> That's a good way to think of it IMO. It's a low-level operation
> (albeit one that encapsulates other, lower-level ones) that tells git
> to rearrange its internal data structures. It is not something that
> has any user-visible effect.

It certainly has a sysadmin-visible effect. Repack a couple of big git repositories and that's a backup tape gone if you do incremental backups: and you can't *not* back up the pack files, even though a lot of the state in them is recoverable from elsewhere on the net: the stuff which is not recoverable is tangled up with the stuff which is.

(of course the solution here was .keep files. I cheered when they were introduced and started rolling git out everywhere I could. There's just one last vast repository maintained by a horrible shell script layered atop SCCS which I have to find some way to convert...)