But it leads us to another problem: how do we keep track of the age of the unreachable objects which didn’t leave the repository? We can’t pack them together into a single packfile since all objects in a pack share the same modification time, updating any object drags them all forward. Setting a small, non-zero grace period makes it much less likely to encounter this race in practice. This is done in order to mitigate a race condition where an unreachable object that is about to be deleted becomes reachable by some other process (like an incoming reference update or a push) before then being deleted, leaving the repository in a corrupt state. This setting defines a “grace period” during which unreachable objects which are not yet old enough to be removed from the repository completely are left alone. In fact, Git does this automatically when running garbage collection.īut observant readers will notice the gc.pruneExpire configuration. And it is often desirable to do just that, particularly when many unreachable objects have piled up, you’re running low on disk space, or similar. But it is free to discard unreachable objects at any time. Similarly, an object is “unreachable” when no such reference exists.Ī Git repository needs all of its reachable objects to ensure that the repository is intact. An object is “reachable” when there is at least one reference (a branch or a tag) from which you can start an object walk (traversing from commits to their parents, from trees into their sub-trees, and so on) and end up at your destination. In Git, we often talk about classifying objects as either “reachable” or “unreachable”. We look forward to seeing you there! A new mechanism for pruning unreachable objects There is still time to submit a proposal to speak. The conference features talks, workshops, and more all about Git and the Git ecosystem. To celebrate this most recent release, here’s GitHub’s look at some of the most interesting features and changes introduced since last time.īefore we get into the details of Git 2.37.0, we first wanted to let you know that Git Merge is returning this September. We last caught up with you on the latest in Git back when 2.36 was released. The open source Git project just released Git 2.37, with features and bug fixes from over 75 contributors, 20 of them new.

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