Re: git gc & deleted branches

On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 03:07:53PM -0500, Brandon Casey wrote:

btw, this is _really_ a non-issue. It seems to keep coming up on the list.

Just know that each one of the config options that you set to zero, including
the one Jeff suggested setting to "now", is a safety mechanism that is there
to ensure that you never ever lose data and that mistakes are recoverable.

Yes, I want to chime in since I have been giving advice in such threads:
Please don't construe my help as any sort of endorsement of this
behavior. Git tries hard not to lose your data, and it is almost always
a bad idea to try to override these safety checks unless you really know
what you are doing.

And even then, try to consider balancing a bit of freed disk space (and
generally _no_ performance gain, because git is very good about not
looking at objects that aren't necessary to the current operation)
versus thinking "oops, I wish I still had that data" in a few days.

I can think offhand of only one time when it was truly useful for me to
prune aggressively, and it was a very special case: a pathologically
large repo for which I was doing a one-shot conversion from another
format (and I wanted to prune failed attempts).

-Peff