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

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 09:09:40PM +0200, David Kastrup [off-list ref] wrote:

Brandon Casey [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

quoted

Well, this may just prove I'm an idiot, but one of the reasons I rarely
run it is that I have trouble remembering exactly what it does; in
particular,

	- does it prune anything that might be needed by a repo I
	  cloned with -s?

    YES! yikes.

This is about the best argument put forth so far for not
automatically running git-gc.

Well, it could also mean that if git finds a dead symbolic link when
looking up an object, it should check the corresponding link target
directory for a pack file with the respective object...  and if it
finds such a pack file, create a link to it and use it.

The problem here is that the clone could be having refs on objects from
the origin that don't have refs left there. git-gc might, at some point,
prune these refs, and the clone would have dangling refs. That could
easily happen, for example, if you rebase a branch in the origin, but
still have a clone with the original branch.

Mike