Subject: Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: "J. Bruce Fields" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 13:44:27 -0400

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 12:09:27AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I personally repack everything way more often than is necessary, and I had 
> kind of assumed that people did it that way, but I was apparently wrong. 
> Comments?

Well, this may just prove I'm an idiot, but one of the reasons I rarely
run it is that I have trouble remembering exactly what it does; in
particular,

	- does it prune anything that might be needed by a repo I
	  cloned with -s?
	- is there anything that's unsafe to do while the git-gc is
	  running?
	- what are the implications for http users if this is a public
	  repo?
	- is git-gc enough on its own or should I be running something
	  more agressive ocassionally too?

No doubt they all have simple answers, which probably amount to "just
don't worry about it", and which I could have found in less time than
it'd take to write this email.  But when I've got other work to do,
reading "man git-gc" is just enough effort for me to postpone the whole
thing to another day.

So, anyway, your message reminded me to run git-gc on my main working
repo.  At which point one of my personal scripts immediately started
failing--it was assuming it could find any ref under .git/refs/, and I
hadn't realized (or maybe I had once, and I'd forgotten) that git-gc
packs refs by default now.

Bah.  I don't know what the moral of that story is.

--b.