git auto-repack is broken...

I actually tend to repack things pretty religiously (ok, not really, but I do "git gc" reasonably regularly, so I was surprised to see thig:

  Auto packing the repository for optimum performance. You may also
  run "git gc" manually. See "git help gc" for more information.

followed by this pitiful effort:

  Counting objects: 8, done.
  Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
  Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
  Writing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
  Total 8 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

Ok, those 8 objects will *not* help anything at all, and the autorepack is broken.

So what's going on? It turns out that I have a fair amount of unreachable objects in this repository, because I do things like fetching things without then merging them, etc. So the "git gc --auto" will happily do "git repack -A" or whatever, and that in turn does *nothing* what-so-ever (or rather, it packs my latest merge commit like the above and generates that pack of a whopping 8 objects).

I can fix it with "git gc --prune=now", so it's not like I personally really care, but since the whole point of "git gc --auto" is to allow people who don't know what they are doing to ignore the whole issue of GC and pruning, I do think this is a real UI bug.

I don't really have any suggestions for fixing it, though. Maybe we should make "git gc --auto" remove any unreachable objects? That would be potentially dangerous in shared repository situations, though. Or have an extra option to "git repack -A" to also pack any loose objects it finds at the end (whether reachable or not)?

                         Linus