Re: Is there a way to trim old SHAs from a git tree (so it's not so large)?

[Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>]

Timur Tabi <timur@freescale.com> wrote:
> Shawn Pearce wrote:
> 
> >Have you tried "git repack -a -d" to repack the loose objects into
> >a pack file?  Doing this every so often should reduce your disk
> >space consumed by a HUGE amount.
> 
> Woah!  It shrunk that bad boy down to 420M!  That should do it, thanks!
> 
> I wonder why the powerpc tree shrank so much.  Do you think the maintainer 
> just needs to run git-repack on his tree?

Possible, yes.

However published repositories don't tend to repack as often as
it makes things harder for people who clone/fetch over HTTP rather
than the native git protocol.

The reason is that HTTP can fetch individual loose objects that
you don't have yet, but if the object is only available in a pack
file then you need to fetch the entire pack file.  But you might
already have most of that pack file, so now you are downloading
lots of data you already have.  :-(

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