Re: removing content from git history

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 18:52 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702211345350.31945@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <20070221183028.GA9088@ginosko.local>

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Michael Hendricks wrote:

> What's a decent way to make a branch into a new repository?  My first
> inclination is to "cp -a" the existing repository, checkout the branch,
> delete all other branches and repack.  That seems to have worked in my
> quick test, but is there a better way?

Like Shawn said the better way is simply to fetch that branch into a new repo.

If you do a cp -a and delete unwanted branches it'll work as well of course, but repacking won't get rid of all the data from the believed to be deleted branches since some reflog, the HEAD reflog in particular, will most probably have references to commits from the removed branches. Therefore the pack will still contain that data, at least untill the reflog entries expire and get pruned.

Of course if you want to publish just the wanted branch and perform a push to a public place then only those objects for that branch will be sent like for the fetch case.

Nicolas