Re: git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter, still a mistery

Jan Wielemaker wrote:
[...]

	% git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter packages/chr HEAD

This indeed creates a nice directory holding only the contents of
packages/chr.  But, starting qgit I see that all commits, also those
that had absolutely nothing to do with this dir are still there.

The trick is to rewrite all refs, not just HEAD.  I usually proceed as
follows:

  cp -a repo repo.old  # just to keep a backup
  cd repo
  git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter somedir -- --all

The --all tells it to rewrite as many refs as possible.  Note that the
-- is required.  Also note that refs/original/* will still point to
the old commits, so they won't "just vanish".  You may want to clone
the repository or delete them manually once you are sure the
filter-branch did the right thing.

- Thomas