Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

On 5 Sep 2007, Steven Grimm stated:

Govind Salinas wrote:

quoted

This is one reason why I really think that gc should be *plumbing*
and *not* porcelain.

That's a good way to think of it IMO. It's a low-level operation
(albeit one that encapsulates other, lower-level ones) that tells git
to rearrange its internal data structures. It is not something that
has any user-visible effect.

It certainly has a sysadmin-visible effect. Repack a couple of big git
repositories and that's a backup tape gone if you do incremental
backups: and you can't *not* back up the pack files, even though a lot
of the state in them is recoverable from elsewhere on the net: the stuff
which is not recoverable is tangled up with the stuff which is.

(of course the solution here was .keep files. I cheered when they were
introduced and started rolling git out everywhere I could. There's just
one last vast repository maintained by a horrible shell script layered
atop SCCS which I have to find some way to convert...)