Hello, thanks for all the work in Git-annex! We've been using since 2018 for Integrated Circuits (ASICs) design with a lot of success.
One feature that would help us would be to be able to Drop Unused, but not all Unused. In our design flow, every 2 or 3 weeks, we update a collection of Objects, replacing, "overwriting" the objects with newer version. So the older becomes Unused.
But we want to keep a certain history depth of Unused. And this cannot be based on dates. Because when we stop working on a certain block/module, the Unused Objects can become quite old (like 6 months), but we still want to keep like for example 3x Unused Objects.
Example: we have overwritten 12x times the same Object "module_a.jpg". So we have 11x Unused versions of "module_a.jpg". We want to keep the latest and +3x latest Unused. So on total only 8x Unused copies would get Dropped.
Is there a way to do that with Git-annex? Or we would need to create a custom script to parse the git-repository, list all the 12x keys of "module_a.jpg", and pick the 8x for Dropping?
Thank you. Best regards. Davi Castro.
Interesting, I had not known that ASIC design would involve the kind of large files git-annex would be useful for.
I think you may want to use
git annex unused --used-refspec='+refs/heads/*:+HEAD:reflog' That adds all versions that are in the reflog. Then you can can configure git to control how much reflog to keep around. (Seegit-gcman page)The other possibility is a new git-annex feature,
git-annex whereused --unused --historicalAfter you run
git annex unused, you can run that to display each unused key, along with the git rev where that key was found to be used.The git rev looks like eg "master~4:filename" or "HEAD@{4}:filename". It will usually be the most recent use, although it prefers older uses that made it into a branch over any revs from the reflog. So you can filter for keys with numbers
> 8or whatever, and get only the older versions of files. Then pipe the keys intogit-annex dropkey --batch.Improving
git annex unusedto be able to do this kind of filtering itself is also a possibility. (See also ?strong>move unused files older than x which was asking for a similar kind of thing with a similar response).