From: Linus Torvalds Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 20:36:39 GMT Subject: Re: Why repository grows after "git gc"? / Purpose of *.keep files? Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Wed, 14 May 2008, Nicolas Pitre wrote: > On Wed, 14 May 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > Of course, the more aggressively we prune, the more we end up having to > > depend on the fact that a commit that is in a pack that is marked "keep" > > must *always* have everything that leads to it in that pack or others also > > marked "keep". We effectively have that already (because we've always > > pruned away the commits early), but it's a thing to keep in mind whenever > > we prune even more aggressively. > > I wonder if this is a good thing. Such a rule would effectively put > restrictions on how objects like big blobs could be distributed amongst > many .keep packs. I just wish we're not painting ourselves in a corner. You can distribute big objects arbitrarily among many .keep packs, but what you can *NOT* do (and which has _always_ been a bug to do) is to have a *.keep pack that refers to objects that are not in a .keep pack! So keep<->keep you can do anything you want, and distribute objects any way. But a keep pack must only refer to objects in itself or in other keep packs. Because otherwise, if we ever hit an object in a keep pack, we'll stop even looking further when we use --unpacked. And that has always been true (admittedly only for "commit" objects, but those are the ones that most commonly refer to other objects, so ..) Linus