Comment by AceJohnny2
2 days ago
Another way that LFS is bad, as I recently discovered, is that the migration will pollute the `.gitattributes` of ancestor commits that do not contain the LFS objects.
In other words, if you migrate a repo that has commits A->B->C, and C adds the large files, then commits A & B will gain a `.gitattributes` referring to the large files that do not exist in A & B.
This is because the migration function will carry its ~gitattributes structure backwards as it walks the history, for caching purposes, and not cross-reference it against the current commit.
That doesn't sound right. There's no way it's adding a file to previous commits, that would change the hash and thereby break a lot of things.
`git lfs migrate ` rewrites the commits to convert large files in the repo to/from LFS pointers, so yes it does change the hashes. That's a well-documented effect.
https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/blob/main/docs/man/git-lf...
Now, granted, usually people run migrate to only convert new local commits, so by nature of the ref include/exclude system it will not touch older commits. But in my case I was converting an entire repo into one using LFS. I hoped it would preserve those commits in a base branch that didn't contain large files, but my disappointment was said .gitattributes pollution.
From the documentation, like 2 paragraphs in:
> In all modes, by default git lfs migrate operates only on the currently checked-out branch, and only on files (of any size and type) added in commits which do not exist on any remote. Multiple options are available to override these defaults.
Were your remotes not configured correctly?
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