git, too many loose objects

[picobyte]

git becomes too slow after many commits and going back in history several times. After a decent amount of modules installed I seem to have to run git repair' and git gc' a lot, and they take a lot of time.

One destructive way to resolve it is go back, in history, to your initial commit throw away (or move) your .git directory and start all over. Not a proper solution, though.

Probably git just stores too much and the loose objects can be cleaned up. I'm not sure how, though.

One way to limit the number of objects is also to commit less. One could instead of every file, only track files that are changed. that would make this handling more error-prone, though, as now the files that are added, but not tracked need to be listed somewhere. Abusing .gitignore for this seems not the right way.

[picobyte]

The problem appears to have been that I tried running vortex, and it just trashed all kinds of backup files all through my fallout directory. Vortex is not compatible with this. Also I'm experimenting with git annex. It seems more suited for storage of binary files, but you need to have it in unlocked mode, steam doesn't seem to work with symlinks.

git init
git annex init

# by default git annex works with symlinks, but that doesn't work well with steam
git annex adjust --unlock
git annex add .
git commit -a -m 'initial Fallout 4 state'

[picobyte]

I've been trying git annex, but just adding all files fallout 4 files under revision makes it impossibly slow after a while. I think the right way is to add all large default Fallout 4 files to the .gitignore file. If any mod touches those, it's a buggy patch anyway and it shouldn't be installed. I'll probably add a protection by excluding rsyncing anything listed in the .gitignore file.