Re: git gc expanding packed data?

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Aug 9, 2009, 02:56 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0908082246020.440@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <m2tz0j154o.fsf@igel.home>

On Sat, 8 Aug 2009, Andreas Schwab wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:
> 
> > It appears that the git installation serving clone requests for
> > git://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git generates lots of unreferenced objects. I
> > just cloned it and the pack I was sent contains 1383356 objects (can be
> > determined with 'git show-index < .git/objects/pack/*.idx | wc -l').
> > However, there are only 978501 actually referenced objects in that
> > cloned repository ( 'git rev-list --all --objects | wc -l').  That makes
> > for 404855 useless objects in the cloned repository.
> 
> Those objects are not useless.  They are referenced by the remote refs
> on the remote side, which are not fetched by default.  If you clone a
> mirror of the repository you'll see no unreferenced objects.

If you do a clone using the git:// protocol and the server sends you only the ref for the trunk branch, then it should send you only objects reachable from that branch. Any extra objects sent by the server are useless to me and wastes my and everyone else's bandwidth, and on my next repack those objects are pruned anyway. The point of the git protocol is _not_ necessarily to send a copy of the remote pack file over, even during a clone.

Nicolas