Reducing size of .git folder

[IndrajeetPatil]

Noticed this while cloning the repo on a new machine.

Currently, {see}'s .git folder is 1.76 GB.
For a comparison, {ggplot2}'s .git folder is 700 MB.

I will do some research on this, but if anyone has ideas, let me know.

[bwiernik]

The issue here is probably lots of old versions of figures stored in the commit history. Running git gc might help, or we might need to do a more aggressive garbage collection to prune items or maybe truncate the commit history to some more recent commit

[strengejacke]

How do we run a garbage collection? The folder is ~3GB meanwhile. If somebody familiar with cleaning, feel free to remove some older history items.

[DominiqueMakowski]

I have some other repos which have huge .git folders too, mostly because of storing & modifying large data files. Is it possible to selective remove from memory all changes done to for e.g., .csv or .pngs etc?

[strengejacke]

git gc --<date> should remove older files from the history, but I'm not sure how to run that command.

[DominiqueMakowski]

sounds dangerous to temper with the git history though