What I really want is to remove files, but when filter-branch didn't seem to do what I wanted, I turned to the idea of rewriting single commits to not include the files in question. This is what I tried with filter-branch: gitk --all shows about 170 commits on directory D in the repo. Of these, maybe 10 don't lead to HEAD, but dangle off the main track. As a test, I decided to let filter-branch create a new repo that only contained the contents of subdirectory B. So I ran git-filter-branch --subdirectory-filter B -- --all and now the resulting repo has just 14 commits. This is clearly not what I wanted because a lot of the original history for subdirectory B is just missing. Actually, in this particular case I get the exact same result with git-filter-branch --subdirectory-filter B HEAD BR / Klas On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Michael J Gruber <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Klas Lindberg venit, vidit, dixit 02.10.2008 16:26: >> Repo size is a problem too, actually. >> >> A solution to both problems seemed to be to use git-filter-branch to >> create a new repo by filtering out all the unwanted files. The >> astonishing result was that, for the subdirectory I tried it on, 90% >> or so of the commits on that subdirectory just disappeared. It didn't >> look right at all. Although I can't say for sure exactly what I did >> with filter-branch, I would appreciate some guidance for using it. It > > I don't know about others, but I would appreciate more info: > Do you want to remove commits (as stated earlier) or files (as stated here)? > What are the boundary conditions? Rewriting history seems to be OK now. > >> basically seemed to do exactly what I wanted (recreate the repo, minus >> some explicit stuff, with history intact otherwise), except the result >> looked crazy. > > That may be due to the filter-branch incarnation, i.e. which refs did > you rewrite (--all or HEAD)? > > Michael > -- 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