Re: Configuring git to for forget removed files

[Jacob Helwig <jacob.helwig@gmail.com>]

On 15:32 Sun 21 Feb     , Larry D'Anna wrote:
> * Andrew Benton (b3nton@gmail.com) [100220 05:37]:
> > Hello world
> > I have a project that I store in a git repository. It's a bunch of source tarballs and
> > some bash scripts to compile it all. Git makes it easy to distribute any changes I make
> > across the computers I run. The problem I have is that over time the repository gets ever
> > larger. When I update to a newer version of something I git rm the old tarball but git
> > still keeps a copy and the folder grows ever larger. At the moment the only solution I
> > have is to periodically rm -rf .git and start again. This works but is less than ideal
> > because I lose all the history for my build scripts.
> > What I would like is to be able to tell git to not keep a copy of anything that has been
> > git rm. The build scripts never get removed, only altered so their history would be
> > preserved. Is it possible to make git delete its backup copies of removed files?
> 
> This reminds me of a scenario I wish git had some way of supporting: I have a
> large collection of mp3s that I have duplicated across several computers.  I
> would love to be able to use git to sync changes between the copies, but there
> are several problems: 
> 
> 1) git is really slow when dealing with thousands of multi-megabyte blobs.
> 
> 2) commiting it to git is going to double the size of the directory, and I don't
> really have space for that on one of the computers that the directory lives on.
> 
> 3) there's no way to discard old history without breaking push and pull.
> 
> I'm not sure exactly what it would take to address 1, but 2 could be addressed
> pretty easily using btrfs file clones (once btrfs is stable), and 3 could be
> dealt with by improving support for shallow clones.
> 
>      --larry

In all seriousness: Why not use a tool that was actually designed for
what you're trying to do? (Sync a music collection across computers.)
Something like syrep[0]?

[0] http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/syrep

-- 
Jacob Helwig