The documentation for the --aggressive flag was misleading, hinting that running git gc with --aggressive is a good thing. However, --aggressive only really makes sense if you have a bad pack file, such as from git-fast-import. --- I keep seeing people regularly packing their repo with git gc --aggressive. However, in my experience, this seldom results in a smaller repository. This can be because the repository was repacked tightly previously (for example, with a high --window value) or because incremental "git gc" just makes better packs anyway. Throwing away that information is often not a good idea. The documentation for the --aggressive flag was misleading, in that it hints that you'll get a smaller pack, which is often not the case. Documentation/git-gc.txt | 8 +++++--- 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/git-gc.txt b/Documentation/git-gc.txt index b6b5ce1..ebf972c 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-gc.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-gc.txt @@ -36,9 +36,11 @@ OPTIONS Usually 'git-gc' runs very quickly while providing good disk space utilization and performance. This option will cause git-gc to more aggressively optimize the repository at the expense - of taking much more time. The effects of this optimization are - persistent, so this option only needs to be used occasionally; every - few hundred changesets or so. + of taking much more time. Note that this will throw away all previous + optimizations. As a result, running git gc with --aggressive will not + necessarily create a smaller pack file, especially when the repository was + packed tightly already. Using --aggressive only makes sense if you have a + badly packed repository, such as created by git-fast-import. --auto:: With this option, `git gc` checks whether any housekeeping is -- 1.5.5.1.174.g32fa0.dirty -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
