Disk waste with packs and .keep files

Hi,

To minimize useless on-disk changes, I have a script that periodically creates .keep files for pack files greater than 10 Mb (so than tools like unison and incremental backup remain efficient). From time to time, I delete these .keep files and "git gc" each repo. This worked well for years.

Since a few weeks however, Git started wasting my disk space: instead of creating small .pack files next to the big .keep-ed pack files, it seems to create redundant, big .pack files (i.e. I get N pack files of similar size). "git verify-pack" confirms that, for example, the object corresponding to the root commit is contained in each of the .pack file.

I don't have a reproducible way to get the situation so I didn't bisect, but "git log --grep .keep" points me to this which seems related:

  commit ee34a2beadb94a9595f09af719e3c09b485ca797
  Author: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
  Date:   Mon Mar 3 15:04:20 2014 -0500

    repack: add `repack.packKeptObjects` config var

Now, my questions:

Is the behavior I observed actually the intended behavior? Should Git be fixed, or should I fix my flow (I guess, stop using .keep files and start using pack.packSizeLimit or so)?

Or is my message not clear enough and do I need to investigate a bit more?

Thanks,