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

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

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