Re: Using git for file archival/backup purposes - deletion strategy

Martin Langhoff schrieb:

What I am not 100% clear on is the "old history" deletion strategy.
The history will be *strictly* linear, so my intention is to keep the
last N commits, by overriding the parent of the Nth commit that git
log lists with a "shallow" entry in $GIT_DIR/shallow as documented in
Documentation/technical/shallow.txt , and call gc after that.

Is that the correct way to "forget" old history? Searching high and
low in the list, I fail to find a definitive answer. Shallow and
grafts entries are discussed as ways of doing this, but I can't find a
"correct" way of doing this.

I'm doing something like this. Basically:

   git rev-parse "HEAD~$N" > .git/info/grafts
   git filter-branch -f HEAD

If you omit filter-branch, then a repack -a -d will corrupt the repository
(I think) unless you keep the grafts file with it and in all its clones
forever.

-- Hannes