Re: git gc & deleted branches

[Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil>]

Jeff King wrote:
> On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 05:15:34PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> 
>>> According to that commit message, prune is now a no-op. However, it
>>> looks like it is still used for trigger a "repack -a" rather than
>>> "repack -A". I don't know if it is worth making that behavior available
>> Well, actually this is a problem.
>>
>> I think it is a good thing to deprecate gc --prune.  but if that means 
>> that repack -a is never used then unreferenced and expired objects will 
>> never be pruned if they're packed if one is always using 'git gc' as we 
>> are advocating.
> 
> I thought that -A would eventually put them all into a single pack,
> killing off the old packs.

'-a' puts everything in a single pack and kills off old packs. Anything that
was unreachable is not repacked in the new pack.

'-A' does the same thing but it also repacks the unreachable objects that were
previously packed.

So if something gets packed that subsequently becomes unreachable it will never
be removed unless 'repack -a' is used.

Possibly --keep-unreachable should instead unpack the unreachable items which would
allow them to eventually be pruned based on pruneExpire. Then we could indeed
get rid of the --prune option to git-gc.

-brandon