Purge the history of c-sources

[reactormonk]

To reduce the size of the repo by an order of magnitude, the c-sources should be purged from the history. However, this will break each and every fork because of history rewrites. How do we want to do this?

[Skrylar]

Are there enough problems with repo size to justify running filter-branch and breaking all of the checkouts right now?

[reactormonk]

An initial clone is about 330MB, which is a bit too much IMO. When removing the build directory with bfg, the size shrinks to 33MB.

[barcharcraz]

as long as we give lots of notice and make sure everyone knows when it is happening I am fine with this.

[Araq]

I think we should do that before we release 0.9.4. We should announce it on the forum and on the wiki and then do it.

[Varriount]

Just a suggestion - Email or post a guide on what contributers should do to fix their forks (since not all of us are.. experienced with the workings of git)

[dom96]

I don't think there is much to it, you just need to delete your current fork and then refork.

[Varriount]

@dom96 That would be the simplest way, however any branches local to the fork would be lost. I don't know about you, but I have several local branches open with partial changes for things.

[Skrylar]

Conceptually you remove the remotes from the old repository, pull the new master in to a separate branch ("master2" or similar), and then perform any rebases from there. You can use rebase to have git apply the contents of a local branch to a new master (this is actually the purpose of rebase, even though people often use it to edit the patch history), and then simply delete the old master and rename master2 accordingly.

Github might take offense to trying to delete master (you'll have to thwack it) but there are certainly procedures to take changes made against one history and shove them on top of a new one.

[reactormonk]

What I found was to use bfg, which I used to purge devel and pushed the responding branch to purged_devel. To move pull-requests over, there is either git rebase --onto <new PR branch> purged_devel <old PR branch> or git cherry-pick devel..<PR branch> when sitting on <new PR branch>.

[Araq]

This has been done.

[reactormonk]

Repo size went down from ~250MB to ~30MB.