On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 10:27:11AM +0200, Mikko Rantalainen wrote: > If I configure bare repo with > > git config gc.pruneExpire never > git config gc.reflogExpire never > > then git will never garbage collect any commit ever stored in the repo. > This is what I want. > > However, all commits referenced only via reflog are kept as loose > objects and will not be included in packs. In long run this will cause > > warning: There are too many unreachable loose objects; run 'git prune' > to remove them. > > and the performance of the repository will slowly decrease. That's not what's supposed to happen. A normal git-gc (or directly running the "git repack" it spawns) should consider objects in reflogs reachable, and pack them as it would an object reachable from a ref. This has been the case since 63049292e0 (Teach git-repack to preserve objects referred to by reflog entries., 2006-12-18). Just to double check: are you sure you have reflogs? They're not enabled by default in bare repos. Another thing that may surprise you is that deleting a branch will delete its reflog (and then the objects are unreachable, and may be exploded loose). > If I have understood correctly, git should notice that reflog will keep > referenced commits forever and include all those commits in packs > instead of keeping those as loose forever. Yes, that's what's supposed to happen. If you have a recipe for reproducing a case where it doesn't, I'd be curious to see it. > A more generic behavior might be to always compress all loose commits in > (one?) special pack so the performance would stay good even if > gc.reflogExpire is very long instead of "never". You can do "git repack -adk", which will keep all packed objects packed, and will suck up loose objects into the pack (and delete their loose counterparts). I don't think there's a convenient way to convince git-gc to do this when it runs "git repack", though. I think it would be a reasonable feature for it to have. -Peff
