Add a section about how to shrink a repository's size after running git-filter-branch to remove large blobs from history. This comes up every week or so on IRC, and the commands required to handle every case are not very newbie-friendly, so hopefully writing them down somewhere leads to fewer questions. Thanks to doener (Björn Steinbrink) for comments and corrections. Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- Or we could just add an option --prune-everything-I-have-a-backup-I-promise to git-filter-branch, so that users can get the same result with less effort. Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt | 36 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 files changed, 36 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt index 1fbbbb4..737c555 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt @@ -339,6 +339,42 @@ git filter-branch --index-filter \ --------------------------------------------------------------- + +Checklist for Shrinking a Repository +------------------------------------ + +git-filter-branch is often used to get rid of a subset of files, +usually with some combination of `\--index-filter` and +`\--subdirectory-filter`. If you want to physically shrink the +repository afterwards, you have some choices: + +* Clone it with `git clone file:///path/to/repo`. The clone will not + have the removed objects. See linkgit:git-clone[1]. (Note that + cloning with a plain path just hardlinks everything!) + +If you really don't want to clone it, for whatever reasons, check the +following points (in this order). This is a very destructive +approach, so *make a backup* or go back to cloning it. You have been +warned. + +* Make sure you really removed all variants of a filename, if a blob + was moved over its lifetime. `git log \--follow \--all \-- foo` can + help you find renames. + +* Make sure you really filtered all refs: use `\--tag-name-filter cat + \-- \--all` when calling git-filter-branch. + +* Make sure you remove the original refs backed up by + git-filter-branch: say `git for-each-ref \--format="%(refname)" + refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git update-ref -d`. + +* Expire all reflogs with `git reflog expire \--expire=now \--all`. + +* Repack to remove packed objects with `git repack -ad`. + +* Prune unpacked unreferenced objects with `git prune \--expire=now`. + + Author ------ Written by Petr "Pasky" Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxx>, -- 1.6.2.rc0.274.g97213 -- 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
