threads / discuss / 8299

Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

Subject: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

## tl;dr

4 messages between May 24, 2007 and May 25, 2007.

replies: 3people: 3as markdown or json

Linus Torvalds· May 24, 2007, 18:41 UTC · lore

I've taught myself to use "git gc" instead of doing the repack explicitly, but it doesn't actually do what I think it should do.

We've had packed refs for a long time now, and I think it just makes sense to pack normal branches too. So I end up having to do

	git pack-refs --all --prune
in order to get a nice git repo that doesn't have any unnecessary files.

So why not just do that in "git gc"? It's not as if there really is any downside to packing branches, even if they end up changing later. Quite often they don't, and even if they do, so what?

Also, make the default for refs packing just be an unambiguous "do it", rather than "do it by default only for non-bare repositories". If you want that behaviour, you can always just add a

	[gc]
		packrefs = notbare

in your ~/.gitconfig file, but I don't actually see why bare would be any different (except for the broken reason that http-fetching used to be totally broken, and not doing it just meant that it didn't even get fixed in a timely manner!).

So here's a trivial patch to make "git gc" do a better job. Hmm?
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
---

Side note: I'd also like to get rid of "info/refs", and just make http fetching use "packed-refs" instead. That would imply that "update_server_info()" should do "git pack-refs --all" too! This patch doesn't do it, though.

 builtin-gc.c |    4 ++--
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/builtin-gc.c b/builtin-gc.c
index 8ea165a..45025fb 100644
--- a/builtin-gc.c
+++ b/builtin-gc.c
@@ -17,11 +17,11 @@
 
 static const char builtin_gc_usage[] = "git-gc [--prune] [--aggressive]";
 
-static int pack_refs = -1;
+static int pack_refs = 1;
 static int aggressive_window = -1;
 
 #define MAX_ADD 10
-static const char *argv_pack_refs[] = {"pack-refs", "--prune", NULL};
+static const char *argv_pack_refs[] = {"pack-refs", "--all", "--prune", NULL};
 static const char *argv_reflog[] = {"reflog", "expire", "--all", NULL};
 static const char *argv_repack[MAX_ADD] = {"repack", "-a", "-d", "-l", NULL};
 static const char *argv_prune[] = {"prune", NULL};
Johannes Schindelin· May 24, 2007, 19:28 UTC · re: Linus Torvalds · lore

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

Hi,
On Thu, 24 May 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Show 5 quoted lines
> I've taught myself to use "git gc" instead of doing the repack explicitly, 
> but it doesn't actually do what I think it should do.
> 
> We've had packed refs for a long time now, and I think it just makes sense 
> to pack normal branches too.

FWIW I already suggested that: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/28533

Since there seemed not much interest in that, I let it slip.

Ciao, Dscho

Junio C Hamano· May 25, 2007, 02:04 UTC · re: Linus Torvalds · lore

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
Show 11 quoted lines
> Also, make the default for refs packing just be an unambiguous "do it", 
> rather than "do it by default only for non-bare repositories". If you want 
> that behaviour, you can always just add a
>
> 	[gc]
> 		packrefs = notbare
>
> in your ~/.gitconfig file, but I don't actually see why bare would be any 
> different (except for the broken reason that http-fetching used to be 
> totally broken, and not doing it just meant that it didn't even get 
> fixed in a timely manner!).
Boy, you are a lot more aggressive than me.

But the fix was in v1.5.0 and we had two feature releases since then, so it's a good time to do this. Thanks.

Linus Torvalds· May 25, 2007, 02:20 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> Boy, you are a lot more aggressive than me.
Heh.

I don't like the http interfaces, so I have a much easier time saying "they were broken, deal with it" ;)

I also think that we mis-calculated earlier in assuming that prople don't have lots of branches, and that packing branches was thus much less important than packing tags.

It's true that in sane git-only environment, you don't have lots of branches (fifty isn't "lots"). But when importing things from other environments, I seem to recall people talking about thousands of branches (since they cannot be merged and they are project-wide rather than some local entity, they cannot disappear).

So I think it's better to just pack branches aggressively too, and in fact, once you do that, and http-fetch knows about it, then that also means that info/refs becomes pointless, because afaik, it doesn't actually contain anything more than what a modern "packed-refs" file contains.

So in order to take that _next_ step, we need to encourage people to pack branches, and then at some point we can hopefully just make http-fetch start ignoring info/refs..

So yeah, I think being aggressive here is a good idea. I really also wanted to make update-server-info do the pack-refs thing, but to do it properly we'd need to make the whole pack-refs thing have a nice library interface, so it was a much bigger (although probably fairly straightforward) thing.

		Linus

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