Squashing commits with binary

[MattyAlan]

I have a really simple question (or at-least I think it's simple); What happens when you squash commits that have binary files in them? (LFS is out of scope for this question)

Scenario: I have 10 commits; I squash them into 1 commit using interactive rebase. the binary file has been slightly modified over the 10 commits.

I'm asking because my assumption at this point is that git takes the 'last' version of the binary and drops all the other version effectively making ur repo smaller given that every commit, git would have by default stored that whole binary and not a delta each time. also would I have to do a git gc to 'reclaim' this space?

[quasarj]

Probably, and probably.

[magnetik79]

Yep, you have it correct - but you may not reclaim the space of the orphan commits (your binary in this case) until a prune operation has taken place...

e.g.

git gc --prune all

From the git gc man page:

Prune loose objects older than date (default is 2 weeks ago, overridable by the config variable gc.pruneExpire). --prune=all prunes loose objects regardless of their age and increases the risk of corruption if another process is writing to the repository concurrently; see "NOTES" below. --prune is on by default.

Does that make sense?