From: Jakub Narebski Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:47:14 GMT Subject: Re: Cutting history Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <4C37F24E.30407@workspacewhiz.com> Joshua Jensen writes: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Enrico Weigelt > Date: 7/9/2010 9:25 PM > > > I'm using git for automatic backups (eg. database dumps). This > > works quite well, but as time goes, the history (and so the repo) > > gets larger and larger. It would be really nice to allow cutting > > off old stuff (eg. after N commits in the past). This is certainly Using Git For What It Was Not Intended... > > > > Maybe that could be done by introducing "stopper" tags: commits > > that have an stopper-tag may have missing parents, and git-gc > > can be told to ignore those parents and throw away everything > > behind the stopper (if not referenced otherwise). > > > > A probably cleaner, but more invasive way could be making refs > > to vectors, which may contain stop points (multiple ones in case > > of merges) additionally to the start point. Remote transmits only > > contain the commits within this range, and GC also just scans > > the range (instead of following all parents). > > Your post reminded me of this: http://progit.org/2010/03/17/replace.html Another solution would be to make history shallower like shallow clone ("git clone --depth ") does it[1], and then prune history. Or you can use grafts to cauterize history. Both of those solutions have disadvantages wrt pushing and pulling to other repositories (shallow clone less so), but I don't think that would be a problem for your situation. [1] Documentation/technical/shallow.txt -- Jakub Narebski Poland ShadeHawk on #git