Geoff, I'm able to prune history with git filter-branch. For example, to throw away history on the current branch before commit 171d7661eda111d3e35f6e8097a1a3a07b30026c, I tried: git filter-branch --parent-filter ' if [ $GIT_COMMIT = 171d7661eda111d3e35f6e8097a1a3a07b30026c ]; then echo ""; else read line; echo $line; fi' I found the diff between that commit and it's rewritten version was empty, and diffs to subsequent commits looked sane. It took an hour on the git repository with about 16k commits. I probably should have excluded all the commits I didn't want to keep to reduce processing time. However, after deleting all but the rewritten branch and cloning the repository, I didn't notice any decrease in the size of .git/, so I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. Also, all the remaining commitIDs changed so any previous clones would have a tough time merging with yours. Another possibility whose results might be similar in runtime and repository size would be to run git rebase --interactive and squash all the commits together before the ones you want to keep. Marcel Geoff Russell wrote: > I have a repository with 5 years worth of history, I only want to keep > 1 year, so I want to purge the > first 4 years. As it happens, the repository only has a single branch > which should > simplify the problem. > > Cheers, > > Geoff Russell > > P.S. Apologies, but I've asked this question before but didn't get an > answer which > I understood or which worked, so perhaps my description of the problem > was faulty. This > is a second attempt. > -- > 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 > -- 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