Re: Why repository grows after "git gc"? / Purpose of *.keep files?

Teemu Likonen wrote (2008-05-12 15:29 +0300):

For testing purposes I deleted objects/pack/*.keep file(s) and ran
"git gc" again. The repo resulted in small again, just like after the
initial clone.

After playing with test repo a while it seems that "git gc" never
touches pack files which have accompanying .keep file around. (And it's
common to have a .keep file after "git clone".) This makes gc perform
faster. A side effect seems to be that objects which later become
unreferenced in those pack-files-with-.keep are never pruned. *.keep
files also seem to prevent from really aggressively optimizing the
repository's size.

Probably a crazy idea: What if "gc --aggressive" first removed *.keep
files and after packing and garbage-collecting and whatever it does it
would add a .keep file for the newly created pack?