Re: git gc & deleted branches

On May 9, 2008, at 00:19, Jeff King wrote:

I like it. It makes an easy rule to say "packed objects _never_ get
pruned, they only get demoted to loose objects." And then of course
we have sane rules for pruning loose objects.

Isn't there an issue with the "git gc" triggering because there
may be too many loose unreferenced objects?
Still, I do like the approach.

Maybe unreferenced objects and old refs should go to a .git/lost+found
directory and be expired from there. This has a couple of benefits:

  -  Easy to manually inspect or blow away any crud
  -  One git-gc run can make one pack in lost+found,
     avoiding huge numbers of loose objects (and massive disk use)
     when trying to do a large cleanup (to possibly reclaim disk space)
  -  Objects will not be accessible by ordinary git commands for a while,
     before they are really removed, avoiding surprises

Only some tools would look in the lost+found to restore stuff.

  -Geert