Re: "git gc" doesn't seem to remove loose objects any more

["Mikael Magnusson" <mikachu@gmail.com>]

2008/12/15 Mark Brown <broonie@sirena.org.uk>:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:56:10AM -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 03:08:34PM +0100, Bj?rn Steinbrink wrote:
>
>> > To clarify that a bit more: git gc keeps unreachable objects unpacked,
>> > so that git prune can drop them. And git gc invokes git prune so that
>> > only unreachable objects older than 2 weeks are dropped.
>
>> To be even more explicit, "git gc" will **unpack** objects that have
>> become unreachable and were currently in packs.  As a result, the
>> amount of disk space used by a git repository can actually go **up**
>> dramatically after a "git gc" operation, which could be surprising for
>> someone who is running close to full on their filesystem, deletes a
>> number of branches from a tracking repository, and then does a "git
>> gc" may get a very unpleasant surprise.
>
> It can also cause things like the "please repack" warning in git gui to
> go off.  This is especially unhelpful since they tend to tell you to go
> and do a gc to resolve the problem.

A thought that occurs to me is to add some sort of flag to git count-objects
that prints the number of objects older than some interval in a separate field.
That way git gui would give less (maybe no) false alarms.

-- 
Mikael Magnusson