TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Purpose
• Usage
• Cheap Fake Clones

PURPOSE

This is a simple script to put old, big blobs into a separate packfile from everything else and creates a .keep file for that pack. The advantages to doing so are as follows:

1. It enables cheap aggressive repacking of the small stuff.

   By keeping a .keep pack around with the really large files that are considered ancient, you can more easily do an aggressive repack of everything else without the heavy expense of delta-ing and repacking the huge files.

2. It enables cheap, "fake" clones for continuous integration.

   Cheap fake clones are similar to shallow clones in that they don't have all objects, but without the atrociously negative workflow side-effects and without gutting debugging capability: one can still run git describe and git log and get useful information since commits and tags are included back to the root. Most operations work just fine; you only run into problems if you specifically run some operation that tries to access the old objects (e.g. git log -p and hold PageDown until you get to an old object, or try to run git fsck or clone your fake clone). See 'CHEAP FAKE CLONES' below for more details.

3. It enables cheap, fake clones for very adventerous developers.

   If you request replace objects to replace the big blobs by simple text files, then the only git operations that fail are those that ignore replace objects (fsck, gc/prune, and clone/fetch of sufficiently old history). The smaller repo takes up less space, and will even make git log -S/-G and git grep on older revisions run faster.

Of course, if your project is ready for a flag day to just excise the big old objects, git filter-repo can help you do so. sequester-old-big-blobs only exists for those projects that are not yet ready for a flag day rewrite of history because they need commit ids to not change.

USAGE

  sequester-old-big-blobs.py --since <WHEN>
                             [--size-cutoff <SIZE>]
                             [--replace-objects]
                             [-- REVS]

This command will place all objects larger than SIZE and older than WHEN and reachable from REVS into a separate packfile. It will then prune any revisions not mentioned in REVS, and do an aggressive repack of remaining objects. If --replace-objects is specified, replace refs for all the old, big objects will be created.

Examples:

  sequester-old-big-blobs.py --since 2017-06-25 -- \
      $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)'
                         $(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name HEAD HEAD@{u})
                         refs/tags/v3.1[5-9]* refs/tags/v3.[2-9]*
                         refs/remotes/origin/3.1[5-9]*
                         refs/remotes/origin/3.[2-9]*)

Before this command:

    $ (cd .git/objects/pack && du -ms *)
    129     pack-7177d0fc85ca7cb07ad85ed32ce85557357a0ccf.idx
    9558    pack-7177d0fc85ca7cb07ad85ed32ce85557357a0ccf.pack

After this command:

    $ (cd .git/objects/pack && du -ms *)
    1       big-old-objects-3d4f228aad746e737a9f712946f3c2f7ebd9c141.idx
    0       big-old-objects-3d4f228aad746e737a9f712946f3c2f7ebd9c141.keep
    7257    big-old-objects-3d4f228aad746e737a9f712946f3c2f7ebd9c141.pack
    117     pack-d4fd34c2ec824f552b08225b8151f8fd218268e0.idx
    1100    pack-d4fd34c2ec824f552b08225b8151f8fd218268e0.pack

  sequester-old-big-blobs.py --since 2019-01-01 --size-cutoff 100k -- \
      $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)'
                         $(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name HEAD HEAD@{u})
                         refs/tags/100.3019* refs/tags/100.30[2-9]*
                         refs/remotes/origin/release/3.19*
                         refs/remotes/origin/release/3.[2-9]*)

Before this command:

    $ (cd .git/objects/pack && du -ms *)
    64      pack-9137f15ae8b793a6d296857e1ee1e983b5f82a79.idx
    1412    pack-9137f15ae8b793a6d296857e1ee1e983b5f82a79.pack

After this command:

    $ (cd .git/objects/pack && du -ms *)
    1	    big-old-objects-f4bfd0644447b997fbfc2c0bc01eb47efae26460.idx
    0	    big-old-objects-f4bfd0644447b997fbfc2c0bc01eb47efae26460.keep
    549	    big-old-objects-f4bfd0644447b997fbfc2c0bc01eb47efae26460.pack
    34	    pack-f4ea1142bb3f5484d0d948d7ec6ab7f9352da572.idx
    359	    pack-f4ea1142bb3f5484d0d948d7ec6ab7f9352da572.pack

You may find git filter-repo --analyze helpful in picking the --since and --size-cutoff parameters.

CHEAP FAKE CLONES

You can create a cheap fake clone by:

1. git clone the actual repository you want (--no-checkout may be useful)
2. Run this script with appropriate paramaters, e.g.

   sequester-old-big-blobs.py --since 2016-01-01
   

3. Do some cleanup:

   find .git -type d -empty -delete
   

4. Create the "cloneable" archive:

     tar cf shrunk-clone.tar \
        --exclude=index --exclude=logs --exclude=info --exclude=hooks \
        --exclude=big-old-objects-* \
        .git```
   

(Note: Step 3 is optional, as is the first line of excludes from step 4.)

And then can use the cheap fake clone by:

• Copy/download shrunk-clone.tar
• mkdir somedir (or git init somedir; doesn't matter)
• cd somedir
• tar xf shrunk-clone.tar
• git reset --hard