我可以展平git存储库中已删除的文件吗？

Question

The git version control system , is a kind of distributed log (with some conceptual similarities to the raft consensus protocol).

Raft and some other systems have a concept of log compaction , so redundant changesets don't bulk down the overall log of changes.

What I want is to 'bulk clean' deleted files - not isolate a single one for exclusion.

My question is: Can I flatten out deleted files from a git repository?

EDIT:

• suppose in my history - I have five separate scenarios of someone checking in five different 100M binary files at different points in time - and I'd rather not have to download that each time someone does a clone. I'm looking for a 'bulk clean of deleted files from my repo' whilst still keeping my repo.

Answer 1

"suppose in my history - I have five separate scenarios of someone checking in a 100M file - and I'd rather not have to download that each time someone does a clone."

Git already does this. As long as the file contents are the same, its hash will be the same. Git uses hashes to identify files, and so the file will resolve to the same hash and will not result in increased space usage.

If, on the other hand, the file contents are slightly different , then the space may or may not be saved, depending on various details of where they are in the git tree, and the options used when a git gc is performed. (Supposing the files are diffable. Binary files may or may not be. Look up git delta compression.)

Having said all that, git is in many ways does not work well with large binary files (I'm assuming that 100 MB files are binary, though they are perhaps not) and you may want to look at something like git large files or something else within git to support large files, or an scm other than git.

Answer 2

Ok - here is the list of things to check:

You can run:

git gc

You can get information using:

git count-objects -v

There is a script here for git-fatfiles .

This is a script for recreating all the branches in a new repo.

Using this you can list the big objects and sort them:

git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack-*.idx | sort -k3n

Using this you can find which commit had the blob that takes up the space.