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

On Wed, 14 May 2008, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

On Wed, 14 May 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

Of course, the more aggressively we prune, the more we end up having to 
depend on the fact that a commit that is in a pack that is marked "keep" 
must *always* have everything that leads to it in that pack or others also 
marked "keep". We effectively have that already (because we've always 
pruned away the commits early), but it's a thing to keep in mind whenever 
we prune even more aggressively.

I wonder if this is a good thing.  Such a rule would effectively put 
restrictions on how objects like big blobs could be distributed amongst 
many .keep packs.  I just wish we're not painting ourselves in a corner.

You can distribute big objects arbitrarily among many .keep packs, but 
what you can *NOT* do (and which has _always_ been a bug to do) is to have 
a *.keep pack that refers to objects that are not in a .keep pack!

So keep<->keep you can do anything you want, and distribute objects any 
way.

But a keep pack must only refer to objects in itself or in other keep 
packs.

Because otherwise, if we ever hit an object in a keep pack, we'll stop 
even looking further when we use --unpacked. And that has always been true 
(admittedly only for "commit" objects, but those are the ones that most 
commonly refer to other objects, so ..)

			Linus