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

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

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

> Now, it may be that James didn't realize how important the
> occasional garbage collect is exactly *because* he is an old-timer
> and used BK long before he used git, and just continued using git
> simply as a BK replacement, but it did make me wonder whether maybe
> this lack of repacking awareness is fairly common.
>
> I've been against automatic repacking, but that was really based on
> what appears to be potentially a very wrong assumption, namely that
> people would do the manual repack on their own. If it turns out that
> people don't do it, maybe the right thing for git to do really is to
> at least notify people when they have way too many pack-files and/or
> loose objects.
>
> 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?

Can it be that getting rid of unused objects is harder once they are
packed?  If that is the case, an automatic pack while mucking about
with temporary branches and/or confidential files would be quite a
nuisance.

Automatic packing maybe would be acceptable if packing was really
transparent to what you do with your repo (including janitoring work).
And it would be nice if automatic packing could be done in an
incremental manner, not bogging down normal work.

-- 
David Kastrup