Re: How to remove a commit object?

["Klas Lindberg" <klas.lindberg@gmail.com>]

What I really want is to remove files, but when filter-branch didn't
seem to do what I wanted, I turned to the idea of rewriting single
commits to not include the files in question.

This is what I tried with filter-branch: gitk --all shows about 170
commits on directory D in the repo. Of these, maybe 10 don't lead to
HEAD, but dangle off the main track. As a test, I decided to let
filter-branch create a new repo that only contained the contents of
subdirectory B. So I ran

    git-filter-branch --subdirectory-filter B -- --all

and now the resulting repo has just 14 commits. This is clearly not
what I wanted because a lot of the original history for subdirectory B
is just missing.

Actually, in this particular case I get the exact same result with

    git-filter-branch --subdirectory-filter B HEAD

BR / Klas

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Michael J Gruber
<git@drmicha.warpmail.net> wrote:
> Klas Lindberg venit, vidit, dixit 02.10.2008 16:26:
>> Repo size is a problem too, actually.
>>
>> A solution to both problems seemed to be to use git-filter-branch to
>> create a new repo by filtering out all the unwanted files. The
>> astonishing result was that, for the subdirectory I tried it on, 90%
>> or so of the commits on that subdirectory just disappeared. It didn't
>> look right at all. Although I can't say for sure exactly what I did
>> with filter-branch, I would appreciate some guidance for using it. It
>
> I don't know about others, but I would appreciate more info:
> Do you want to remove commits (as stated earlier) or files (as stated here)?
> What are the boundary conditions? Rewriting history seems to be OK now.
>
>> basically seemed to do exactly what I wanted (recreate the repo, minus
>> some explicit stuff, with history intact otherwise), except the result
>> looked crazy.
>
> That may be due to the filter-branch incarnation, i.e. which refs did
> you rewrite (--all or HEAD)?
>
> Michael
>