Git history cleanup advanced for an urgent customer need — starting now

[wybaby168]

Update — July 13, 2026: We are advancing this cleanup and starting it now. An urgent customer requirement needs reliable fresh clones and self-hosted source delivery sooner than the original 24-hour window. The cleanup scope and safety gates are unchanged.

We are performing a one-time history cleanup for the public flyfish-dev/file-viewer repository.

Why

Older public history contains generated dist trees, release tarballs, static-site archives, and duplicated viewer assets. These files belong in GitHub Releases or build output, not permanent Git history. The current source tree is reproducible and lean, but the obsolete historical copies still make the public Git data more than 10 GiB. A customer needs a practical source checkout now, so we are advancing the cleanup.

• Public main at cleanup start: b5db2f699c1b7cbd8031df112e8c776221a370d6
• Cleanup start: 2026-07-13 (UTC+08:00)
• Scope: public GitHub branches and tags only
• Not affected: package version 2.1.27, npm/Docker releases, runtime APIs, GitHub Release downloads, or the private Gitea repository/history

Commit-history preservation

This is a file-content cleanup, not a history squash. We will not collapse the repository into a snapshot or remove the project's development record.

• Every reachable commit must map one-to-one from its old SHA to a new SHA.
• Empty commits and merge commits are retained.
• Commit messages, authors, committers, timestamps, parent topology, branches, tags, and annotated-tag metadata are preserved.
• Pre/post commit, merge, root, branch, and tag counts must match exactly.
• A full pre-rewrite bundle, SHA-256 checksum, commit map, manifests, and audit report are retained.
• If any history-preservation or build gate fails, rewritten refs will not be pushed.

Commit and tag SHAs will necessarily change because historical file trees are being rewritten. Existing clones should keep local work on a backup branch, then resynchronize after the completion update:

git fetch origin --prune --tags
git switch main
git branch backup/pre-history-cleanup
git reset --hard origin/main

Fork maintainers should similarly preserve local work before resetting or recreating branches from the rewritten upstream. Fresh clones will require no special action.

The rewritten repository will be validated in isolated full and shallow clones with frozen install, type checking, tests, builds, documentation build, Chromium smoke tests, history-integrity checks, and repository-size gates before publication. A completion update with the old-to-new main mapping will be posted here after the rewritten CI is green.

[wybaby168]

The expedited cleanup is complete. We advanced it because an urgent customer integration needed a reliable source clone immediately; the public/private boundary and preservation gates remained unchanged.

What was preserved:

• all 961 public commits, including 11 merge commits and 4 root commits;
• all 3 public branch heads and all 33 tags;
• commit messages, authors, committers, timestamps, and parent topology through a one-to-one old-to-new commit map;
• the exact current main file tree (no source/API/version change in this operation).

What was removed from historical trees:

• generated release archives and tarballs;
• historical dist and static-site outputs;
• duplicated viewer/runtime assets that already have an authoritative source location.

Audit and verification:

• old main: b5db2f699c1b7cbd8031df112e8c776221a370d6
• rewritten main: 8e7404d95f4a5f218463b94d8dd216d01aaa87af
• all 36 public refs were updated atomically with explicit force-with-lease checks
• the rewritten full pack is about 133 MiB
• a fresh shallow clone from GitHub is about 97 MiB of Git data, with an approximately 207 MiB worktree
• post-rewrite Public CI passed
• main deletion and non-fast-forward protection is active again

If you already cloned the repository, save any local work first, then realign your clone:

git status
git switch main
git branch backup/pre-history-cleanup
git fetch origin --prune --tags --force
git reset --hard origin/main

For a fork or a feature branch with original work, create a new branch from the rewritten origin/main and cherry-pick only your own commits. Do not merge the old main history back, because that would reintroduce the removed generated objects.

GitHub's displayed repository-size metric may lag behind the actual clone size until server-side garbage collection completes.