Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

[Linus Torvalds]

I've taught myself to use "git gc" instead of doing the repack explicitly, 
but it doesn't actually do what I think it should do.

We've had packed refs for a long time now, and I think it just makes sense 
to pack normal branches too. So I end up having to do

	git pack-refs --all --prune

in order to get a nice git repo that doesn't have any unnecessary files.

So why not just do that in "git gc"? It's not as if there really is any 
downside to packing branches, even if they end up changing later. Quite 
often they don't, and even if they do, so what?

Also, make the default for refs packing just be an unambiguous "do it", 
rather than "do it by default only for non-bare repositories". If you want 
that behaviour, you can always just add a

	[gc]
		packrefs = notbare

in your ~/.gitconfig file, but I don't actually see why bare would be any 
different (except for the broken reason that http-fetching used to be 
totally broken, and not doing it just meant that it didn't even get 
fixed in a timely manner!).

So here's a trivial patch to make "git gc" do a better job. Hmm?

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
---

Side note: I'd also like to get rid of "info/refs", and just make http 
fetching use "packed-refs" instead. That would imply that 
"update_server_info()" should do "git pack-refs --all" too! This patch 
doesn't do it, though.

 builtin-gc.c |    4 ++--
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/builtin-gc.c b/builtin-gc.c
index 8ea165a..45025fb 100644
--- a/builtin-gc.c
+++ b/builtin-gc.c
@@ -17,11 +17,11 @@
 
 static const char builtin_gc_usage[] = "git-gc [--prune] [--aggressive]";
 
-static int pack_refs = -1;
+static int pack_refs = 1;
 static int aggressive_window = -1;
 
 #define MAX_ADD 10
-static const char *argv_pack_refs[] = {"pack-refs", "--prune", NULL};
+static const char *argv_pack_refs[] = {"pack-refs", "--all", "--prune", NULL};
 static const char *argv_reflog[] = {"reflog", "expire", "--all", NULL};
 static const char *argv_repack[MAX_ADD] = {"repack", "-a", "-d", "-l", NULL};
 static const char *argv_prune[] = {"prune", NULL};

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> I've taught myself to use "git gc" instead of doing the repack explicitly, 
> but it doesn't actually do what I think it should do.
> 
> We've had packed refs for a long time now, and I think it just makes sense 
> to pack normal branches too.

FWIW I already suggested that: 
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/28533

Since there seemed not much interest in that, I let it slip.

Ciao,
Dscho

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

[Junio C Hamano]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

> Also, make the default for refs packing just be an unambiguous "do it", 
> rather than "do it by default only for non-bare repositories". If you want 
> that behaviour, you can always just add a
>
> 	[gc]
> 		packrefs = notbare
>
> in your ~/.gitconfig file, but I don't actually see why bare would be any 
> different (except for the broken reason that http-fetching used to be 
> totally broken, and not doing it just meant that it didn't even get 
> fixed in a timely manner!).

Boy, you are a lot more aggressive than me.

But the fix was in v1.5.0 and we had two feature releases since
then, so it's a good time to do this.  Thanks.

Re: Make "git gc" pack all refs by default

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> Boy, you are a lot more aggressive than me.

Heh. 

I don't like the http interfaces, so I have a much easier time saying 
"they were broken, deal with it" ;)

I also think that we mis-calculated earlier in assuming that prople don't 
have lots of branches, and that packing branches was thus much less 
important than packing tags.

It's true that in sane git-only environment, you don't have lots of 
branches (fifty isn't "lots"). But when importing things from other 
environments, I seem to recall people talking about thousands of branches 
(since they cannot be merged and they are project-wide rather than some 
local entity, they cannot disappear).

So I think it's better to just pack branches aggressively too, and in 
fact, once you do that, and http-fetch knows about it, then that also 
means that info/refs becomes pointless, because afaik, it doesn't actually 
contain anything more than what a modern "packed-refs" file contains.

So in order to take that _next_ step, we need to encourage people to pack 
branches, and then at some point we can hopefully just make http-fetch 
start ignoring info/refs..

So yeah, I think being aggressive here is a good idea. I really also 
wanted to make update-server-info do the pack-refs thing, but to do it 
properly we'd need to make the whole pack-refs thing have a nice library 
interface, so it was a much bigger (although probably fairly 
straightforward) thing.

		Linus