on git gc --aggressive [was Re: Version Control Software]

[rusi]

On Jun 16, 7:09 pm, Jason Swails <jason.swa... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:55 PM, rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Jun 16, 4:14 am, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jun 16, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Roy Smith <r... at panix.com> wrote:
> > > > The advantage of DVCS is that everybody has a full copy of the repo.
> > > > The disadvantage of the DVCS is that every MUST have a full copy of the
> > > > repo.  When a repo gets big, you may not want to pull all of that data
> > > > just to get the subtree you need.
>
> > > Yeah, and depending on size, that can be a major problem. While git
> > > _will_ let you make a shallow clone, it won't let you push from that,
> > > so it's good only for read-only repositories (we use git to manage
> > > software deployments at work - shallow clones are perfect) or for
> > > working with patch files.
>
> > > Hmm. ~/cpython/.hg is 200MB+, but ~/pike/.git is only 86MB. Does
> > > Mercurial compress its content? A tar.gz of each comes down, but only
> > > to ~170MB and ~75MB respectively, so I'm guessing the bulk of it is
> > > already compressed. But 200MB for cpython seems like a lot.
>
> > [I am assuming that you have run  "git gc --aggressive" before giving
> > those figures]
>
> Off-topic, but this is a bad idea in most cases.  This is a post including
> an email from Torvalds proclaiming how and why git gc --aggressive is dumb
> in 99% of cases and should rarely be used:
>
> http://metalinguist.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/the-woes-of-git-gc-aggre...

Yeah... Thanks for that link.
I knew there's something about gc and something about pack. Too much
of a git noob to know which is which!