Re: New command/tool: git filter-repo

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 8, 2019, 10:22 UTC
Message-ID: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1902081119320.41@tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BGOz8nks0+Tdw5GyGqxeYR-3FF6FT5JcgVqZDYVRQ6qog@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Elijah,

On Thu, 7 Feb 2019, Elijah Newren wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 12:57 AM Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:
> > git-filter-repo[1], a filter-branch-like tool for rewriting repository
> > history, is ready for more widespread testing and feedback.  The rough
> 
> Someone at the Contributor Summit (Michael Haggerty perhaps?) asked me
> about performance numbers on known repositories for filter-repo and
> how it compared to other tools; I gave extremely rough estimates, but
> here I belatedly provide some more detailed figures.  In each case, I
> report both filtering time, and cleanup (gc or clone) time[0]:
> 
> [...]

Those are pretty good numbers right there.

>  My hope is that filter-repo serves as a good general purpose filtering
>  tool so that people can stop suffering from filter-branch.

I agree. `git filter-branch` was simply pulled out of Cogito when that project was declared discontinued, as the last nugget we could steal from the carcass (we stole such a lot from Cogito that we're probably the reason it died).

And when somebody started to rewrite it in C (calling it `git rewrite-commits` if memory serves), I asked to change it a little so it could be used as a drop-in replacement for `filter-branch`, and unfortunately stopped that effort in its tracks.

So it is really good for me to see you picking up the initiative and make that particular shell script obsolete.

Ciao, Dscho

P.S.: No, I am not willing to even attempt to run filter-branch on Windows.