On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 06:08:18PM +0100, Simon Holmberg wrote:

I've been experimenting with the new Partial Clone feature, attempting
to use it to filter out the otherwise full history of the large binary
resources in our repos. It works really well on the initial clone. But
once you start jumping around in history a lot, the repo will grow out
of proportion again as promised pack files are fetched.

Are there any plans to add a --filter parameter to git gc as well,
that would be able to prune past history of objects and convert them
back into pack promises? Or am I wrong in assuming that this could
ever act as a native replacement for LFS? Without this, a repo would
only continue to grow ad infinitum, resulting in the same issues as
before unless you actively chose to delete your entire clone and
re-clone it from upstream once in a while.

I don't recall seeing anybody actively working on this, but I think it
would be a good idea. You'd probably want to be able to specify it in
your config somehow, so that subsequent repacks pruned as necessary
without you having to remember to do it each time.

You could naively just drop everything that matches the filter, and then
re-fetch it as needed. But for efficiency, you may want to keep some
other objects:

  - objects mentioned directly in the index, or the tree of HEAD; you'd
    end up re-fetching these next time you "git checkout"

  - perhaps objects fetched recently are more worth keeping (e.g., ones
    with an mtime less than a day or two). I don't know if that helps,
    though. What you really care about is how recently they were
    accessed (assuming there's some locality there), not written. A
    frequently-accessed object may have been fetched immediately after
    you cloned, giving it an old mtime.

    Since we can get any of the objects again if we want and we're just
    optimizing, this is really just a cache-expiration problem. But it
    may be hard to implement any of the stock algorithms without having
    logs of which objects were accessed.

-Peff