Re: Rewriting history with git-filter-branch and leaking objects (?)

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 07:34:32PM +0200, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
> 
> > I've been playing with git-filter-branch, and was wondering how objects
> > from the original branch are supposed to be removed.
> >
> > It looks like removing the refs/original/* refs is not enough.
> >
> > And it also looks like when all references seem to be removed, git-prune
> > doesn't fully do its job...
> 
> It is quite quite hard to get rid of objects.  You need to get the
> reflogs for the commits and the files expired.
> 
> The last time I tried this, I ended up unpacking the packed objects,
> calling git-fsck with appropriate options to tell me about
> unreferenced objects when ignoring reflogs, and removing the files
> manually with xargs and rm.
> 
> Probably I was not able to do something reasonably intelligent, but
> making git actually _lose_ data/commits/whatever is really, really
> hard.  I have messed up my repo structure considerably several times,
> and everything is still there, with the reflog telling you how to get
> it.
> 
> Given how easy it is to shoot oneself in the foot with git, it is not
> the worst thing.  But you really have to work if you _mean_ it.

Well, with the introduction of git-filter-branch, once you have
rewritten your history and validated that everything is okay,
you might mean to remove the original branch...

Mike