The BFG is a tool specifically designed for the task of removing
unwanted data from Git repository history - a common use-case for which
git-filter-branch has been the traditional workhorse.
It's beneficial to let users know that filter-branch has an alternative
here:
* speed : The BFG is 10-50x faster
http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/#speed
* complexity of configuration : filter-branch is a very flexible tool,
but demands very careful usage in order to get the desired results
http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/#examples
Obviously, filter-branch has it's advantages too - it permits very
complex rewrites, and doesn't require a JVM - but for the common
use-case of deleting unwanted data, it's helpful to users to be aware
that an alternative exists.
The BFG was released under the GPL in February 2013, and has since seen
widespread production use (The Guardian, RedHat, Google, UK Government
Digital Service), been tested against large repos (~300K commits, ~5GB
packfiles) and received significant positive feedback from users:
http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/#feedback
Signed-off-by: Roberto Tyley <roberto.tyley@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
filter-branch --env-filter example that shows how to change the email
address in all commits before publishing a project.
Signed-off-by: Tadeusz Andrzej Kadłubowski <yess@hell.org.pl>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
There is a rare edge case of git-filter-branch: a filter that unsets
identity variables from the environment. Link to git-commit-tree
clarifies how Git would fall back in this situation.
Signed-off-by: Tadeusz Andrzej Kadłubowski <yess@hell.org.pl>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The note that explains that changes introduced by removed commits are
preserved should be placed directly after the paragraph that describes
such commits removal. Otherwise the reference to "the commits" appears
out of context.
Also the big example that follows "Consider this history" is about
rewriting part of the history DAG. Move the paragraph that
describes the operation close to it.
Signed-off-by: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Our documentation used to assume having files in .git/refs/*
directories was the only to have branches and tags, but that is not
true for quite some time.
* jc/tag-doc:
Documentation: do not mention .git/refs/* directories
It is an implementation detail that a new tag is created by adding a
file in the .git/refs/tags directory. The only thing the user needs
to know is that a "git tag" creates a ref in the refs/tags namespace,
and without "-f", it does not overwrite an existing tag.
Inspired by a report from 乙酸鋰 <ch3cooli@gmail.com>; I think I
caught all the existing mention in Documentation/ directory in the
tip of 1.7.9.X maintenance track, but we may have added new ones
since then.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In asciidoc 7, backticks like `foo` produced a typographic
effect, but did not otherwise affect the syntax. In asciidoc
8, backticks introduce an "inline literal" inside which markup
is not interpreted. To keep compatibility with existing
documents, asciidoc 8 has a "no-inline-literal" attribute to
keep the old behavior. We enabled this so that the
documentation could be built on either version.
It has been several years now, and asciidoc 7 is no longer
in wide use. We can now decide whether or not we want
inline literals on their own merits, which are:
1. The source is much easier to read when the literal
contains punctuation. You can use `master~1` instead
of `master{tilde}1`.
2. They are less error-prone. Because of point (1), we
tend to make mistakes and forget the extra layer of
quoting.
This patch removes the no-inline-literal attribute from the
Makefile and converts every use of backticks in the
documentation to an inline literal (they must be cleaned up,
or the example above would literally show "{tilde}" in the
output).
Problematic sites were found by grepping for '`.*[{\\]' and
examined and fixed manually. The results were then verified
by comparing the output of "html2text" on the set of
generated html pages. Doing so revealed that in addition to
making the source more readable, this patch fixes several
formatting bugs:
- HTML rendering used the ellipsis character instead of
literal "..." in code examples (like "git log A...B")
- some code examples used the right-arrow character
instead of '->' because they failed to quote
- api-config.txt did not quote tilde, and the resulting
HTML contained a bogus snippet like:
<tt><sub></tt> foo <tt></sub>bar</tt>
which caused some parsers to choke and omit whole
sections of the page.
- git-commit.txt confused ``foo`` (backticks inside a
literal) with ``foo'' (matched double-quotes)
- mentions of `A U Thor <author@example.com>` used to
erroneously auto-generate a mailto footnote for
author@example.com
- the description of --word-diff=plain incorrectly showed
the output as "[-removed-] and {added}", not "{+added+}".
- using "prime" notation like:
commit `C` and its replacement `C'`
confused asciidoc into thinking that everything between
the first backtick and the final apostrophe were meant
to be inside matched quotes
- asciidoc got confused by the escaping of some of our
asterisks. In particular,
`credential.\*` and `credential.<url>.\*`
properly escaped the asterisk in the first case, but
literally passed through the backslash in the second
case.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Make it clear that git-filter-branch will honor and make permanent
replacement refs as well as grafts.
Signed-off-by: Peter Collingbourne <peter@pcc.me.uk>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The GIT_INDEX_FILE variable we get from git has the full
path to the repo, which may contain spaces. When we use it
in our shell snippet, it needs to be quoted.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The point of these sections is generally to:
1. Give credit where it is due.
2. Give the reader an idea of where to ask questions or
file bug reports.
But they don't do a good job of either case. For (1), they
are out of date and incomplete. A much more accurate answer
can be gotten through shortlog or blame. For (2), the
correct contact point is generally git@vger, and even if you
wanted to cc the contact point, the out-of-date and
incomplete fields mean you're likely sending to somebody
useless.
So let's drop the fields entirely from all manpages except
git(1) itself. We already point people to the mailing list
for bug reports there, and we can update the Authors section
to give credit to the major contributors and point to
shortlog and blame for more information.
Each page has a "This is part of git" footer, so people can
follow that to the main git manpage.
Remove some stray usage of other bracket types and asterisks for the
same purpose.
Signed-off-by: Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Currently, the help for git filter-branch refers users of --env-filter
to git-commit for information about environment variables affecting
commits. However, this information is not contained in the git-commit
help, but is very explicitly detailed in git-commit-tree.
Signed-off-by: Wesley J. Landaker <wjl@icecavern.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We can be clever and know by ourselves when we need the behavior
implied by "--remap-to-ancestor". No need to encumber users by having
them exposed to it as a tunable. (Option kept for backward compatibility,
but it's now a no-op.)
Signed-off-by: Csaba Henk <csaba@gluster.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
If there is a quoted path, update-index will correctly
unquote it. However, we must take care to put our new prefix
inside the double-quote.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The documentation was quite inconsistent when spelling 'git cmd' if it
only refers to the program, not to some specific invocation syntax:
both 'git-cmd' and 'git cmd' spellings exist.
The current trend goes towards dashless forms, and there is precedent
in 647ac70 (git-svn.txt: stop using dash-form of commands.,
2009-07-07) to actively eliminate the dashed variants.
Replace 'git-cmd' with 'git cmd' throughout, except where git-shell,
git-cvsserver, git-upload-pack, git-receive-pack, and
git-upload-archive are concerned, because those really live in the
$PATH.
Use `code snippet` style instead of 'emphasis' for `git cmd ...`
according to the following rules:
* The SYNOPSIS sections are left untouched.
* If the intent is that the user type the command exactly as given, it
is `code`.
If the user is only loosely referred to a command and/or option, it
remains 'emphasised'.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Since a0e4639 (filter-branch: fix ref rewriting with
--subdirectory-filter, 2008-08-12) git-filter-branch has done
nearest-ancestor rewriting when using a --subdirectory-filter.
However, that rewriting strategy is also a useful building block in
other tasks. For example, if you want to split out a subset of files
from your history, you would typically call
git filter-branch -- <refs> -- <files>
But this fails for all refs that do not point directly to a commit
that affects <files>, because their referenced commit will not be
rewritten and the ref remains untouched.
The code was already there for the --subdirectory-filter case, so just
introduce an option that enables it independently.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When you have to add certain lines like ACKs (or for that matter,
Signed-off-by:s) to a range of commits starting with HEAD, you might
be tempted to use 'git rebase -i -10', but that is a waste of your
time.
It is better to use 'git filter-branch' with an appropriate message
filter, and this commit adds an example how to do so to
filter-branch's man page.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
* maint:
GIT 1.6.2.3
State the effect of filter-branch on graft explicitly
process_{tree,blob}: Remove useless xstrdup calls
Conflicts:
GIT-VERSION-GEN
Rearrange the example usage of
git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached ...'
so that --ignore-unmatch is in the main example block. People keep
stumbling over the (lack of this) option to the point where it is a
FAQ, so we would want to expose the most common usage where it stands
out.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add a section about how to shrink a repository's size after running
git-filter-branch to remove large blobs from history.
This comes up every week or so on IRC, and the commands required to
handle every case are not very newbie-friendly, so hopefully writing
them down somewhere leads to fewer questions.
It may seem contradictory to document fallbacks for older Gits in
newer docs, but we want to point people at this as a FAQ answer, and
they will frequently not have the newest version installed.
Thanks to Björn Steinbrink and Junio C Hamano for comments and
corrections.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
git_commit_non_empty_tree is added to the functions that can be run from
commit filters. Its effect is to commit only commits actually touching the
tree and that are not merge points either.
The option --prune-empty is added. It defaults the commit-filter to
'git_commit_non_empty_tree "$@"', and can be used with any other
combination of filters, except --commit-hook that must used
'git_commit_non_empty_tree "$@"' where one puts 'git commit-tree "$@"'
usually to achieve the same result.
Signed-off-by: Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This points readers at the "Recovering from upstream rebase" warning
in git-rebase(1) when we talk about rewriting published history in the
'reset', 'commit --amend', and 'filter-branch' documentation.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Document the '--' option that can be used to pass rev-list options
(not just arguments), and give an example usage of '-- --all'. Remove
reference to "the new branch name"; filter-branch takes arbitrary
arguments to rev-list since dfd05e3.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When the SYNOPSIS says e.g. "<path>...", it is nice if the DESCRIPTION
also mentions "<path>..." and says the specified "paths" (note plural)
are used for $whatever. This fixes the obvious mismatches.
Signed-off-by: Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@toroid.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The example to remove paths using index-filter was done with
"git update-index --remove"; "git rm --cached" would be more familiar to
new people and is sufficient for this particular case.
Signed-off-by: Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The names of git commands are not meant to be entered at the
commandline; they are just names. So we render them in italics,
as is usual for command names in manpages.
Using
doit () {
perl -e 'for (<>) { s/\`(git-[^\`.]*)\`/'\''\1'\''/g; print }'
}
for i in git*.txt config.txt diff*.txt blame*.txt fetch*.txt i18n.txt \
merge*.txt pretty*.txt pull*.txt rev*.txt urls*.txt
do
doit <"$i" >"$i+" && mv "$i+" "$i"
done
git diff
.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
With git-commands moving out of $(bindir), it is useful to make a
clearer distinction between the git subcommand 'git-whatever' and
the command you type, `git whatever <options>`. So we use a dash
after "git" when referring to the former and not the latter.
I already sent a patch doing this same thing, but I missed some
spots.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Following what appears to be the predominant style, format
names of commands and commandlines both as `teletype text`.
While we're at it, add articles ("a" and "the") in some
places, italicize the name of the command in the manual page
synopsis line, and add a comma or two where it seems appropriate.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Since the git-* commands are not installed in $(bindir), using
"git-command <parameters>" in examples in the documentation is
not a good idea. On the other hand, it is nice to be able to
refer to each command using one hyphenated word. (There is no
escaping it, anyway: man page names cannot have spaces in them.)
This patch retains the dash in naming an operation, command,
program, process, or action. Complete command lines that can
be entered at a shell (i.e., without options omitted) are
made to use the dashless form.
The changes consist only of replacing some spaces with hyphens
and vice versa. After a "s/ /-/g", the unpatched and patched
versions are identical.
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@uchicago.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The OPTIONS section of a documentation file contains a list
of the options a git command accepts.
Currently there are several variants to describe the case that
different options (almost) do the same in the OPTIONS section.
Some are:
-f, --foo::
-f|--foo::
-f | --foo::
But AsciiDoc has the special form:
-f::
--foo::
This patch applies this form to the documentation of the whole git suite,
and removes useless em-dash prevention, so \--foo becomes --foo.
Signed-off-by: Stephan Beyer <s-beyer@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
As the "git" man page describes the "git" command at the end-user
level, it seems better to move it to man section 1.
Signed-off-by: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The old description was misleading and logically impossible. It claimed that
the ancestors of the original commit would be re-written to have the multiple
emitted ids as parents. Not only would this modify existing objects, but it
would create a cycle. What this actually does is pass the multiple emitted ids
to the newly-created children to use as parents.
Signed-off-by: Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Add support for creating a new tag object and retaining the tag message,
author, and date when rewriting tags. The gpg signature, if one exists,
will be stripped.
This adds nearly proper tag name filtering to filter-branch. Proper tag
name filtering would include the ability to change the tagger, tag date,
tag message, and _not_ strip a gpg signature if the tag did not change.
Signed-off-by: Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Since commit 8c1ce0f46b filter-branch fails
when a <command> has a non-zero exit status. This commit makes it clear
in the documentation and also fixes the parent-filter example, that was
incorrectly returning non-zero when the commit being tested wasn't the
one to be rewritten.
Signed-off-by: Caio Marcelo de Oliveira Filho <cmarcelo@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
There were no example on how to edit commit messages, so add an msg-filter
example.
Signed-off-by: Miklos Vajna <vmiklos@frugalware.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
