Re: git auto-repack is broken...

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Dec 2, 2011, 16:56 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFyq28vmo9dk-5mVm+nNn86qSjNT6VJGc09iaJo=+OP1Sg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACBZZX7Q5qb1r_Oh0QfMiWh9UAM1c6QWBn4abv-xHpFBaKuyKg@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>
>> Maybe we should make "git gc --auto" remove any unreachable objects?
>
> Wouldn't that mean that any loose commit objects you have lying around
> would be removed by the automatic git gc?
>
> One feature of git that I personally rely on is that I can liberally
> move heads around / make commits on detached heads and not have those
> commits gc'd unless I explicitly ask for it for a while.

Well, with reflogs, you actually do have those objects reachable for quite a while (90 days by default).

The "unreachable objects" tends to happen when you do fetches without ever merging the result or actually remove branches (and/or expiring the reflogs early etc). Not from the normal "use 'git reset' and friends to move heads around".

That said, I do agree that removing loose objects is the much less safe approach.

Of course, repacking the objects results in problems too: now you've entirely lost the age information for that object, so now you cannot prune it based on age any more.

But leaving the loose objects around and basically failing auto-gc isn't good either.

                     Linus