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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 14:47:53 +0000
committerDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-07 14:47:53 +0000
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tree24e09d9f84dec336720cf393e156089ca2835791 /Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt
parentInitial commit. (diff)
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Adding upstream version 1:2.39.2.upstream/1%2.39.2upstream
Signed-off-by: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>
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+git-filter-branch(1)
+====================
+
+NAME
+----
+git-filter-branch - Rewrite branches
+
+SYNOPSIS
+--------
+[verse]
+'git filter-branch' [--setup <command>] [--subdirectory-filter <directory>]
+ [--env-filter <command>] [--tree-filter <command>]
+ [--index-filter <command>] [--parent-filter <command>]
+ [--msg-filter <command>] [--commit-filter <command>]
+ [--tag-name-filter <command>] [--prune-empty]
+ [--original <namespace>] [-d <directory>] [-f | --force]
+ [--state-branch <branch>] [--] [<rev-list options>...]
+
+WARNING
+-------
+'git filter-branch' has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious
+manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little
+time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance).
+These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and
+as such, its use is not recommended. Please use an alternative history
+filtering tool such as https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/[git
+filter-repo]. If you still need to use 'git filter-branch', please
+carefully read <<SAFETY>> (and <<PERFORMANCE>>) to learn about the land
+mines of filter-branch, and then vigilantly avoid as many of the hazards
+listed there as reasonably possible.
+
+DESCRIPTION
+-----------
+Lets you rewrite Git revision history by rewriting the branches mentioned
+in the <rev-list options>, applying custom filters on each revision.
+Those filters can modify each tree (e.g. removing a file or running
+a perl rewrite on all files) or information about each commit.
+Otherwise, all information (including original commit times or merge
+information) will be preserved.
+
+The command will only rewrite the _positive_ refs mentioned in the
+command line (e.g. if you pass 'a..b', only 'b' will be rewritten).
+If you specify no filters, the commits will be recommitted without any
+changes, which would normally have no effect. Nevertheless, this may be
+useful in the future for compensating for some Git bugs or such,
+therefore such a usage is permitted.
+
+*NOTE*: This command honors `.git/info/grafts` file and refs in
+the `refs/replace/` namespace.
+If you have any grafts or replacement refs defined, running this command
+will make them permanent.
+
+*WARNING*! The rewritten history will have different object names for all
+the objects and will not converge with the original branch. You will not
+be able to easily push and distribute the rewritten branch on top of the
+original branch. Please do not use this command if you do not know the
+full implications, and avoid using it anyway, if a simple single commit
+would suffice to fix your problem. (See the "RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM
+REBASE" section in linkgit:git-rebase[1] for further information about
+rewriting published history.)
+
+Always verify that the rewritten version is correct: The original refs,
+if different from the rewritten ones, will be stored in the namespace
+'refs/original/'.
+
+Note that since this operation is very I/O expensive, it might
+be a good idea to redirect the temporary directory off-disk with the
+`-d` option, e.g. on tmpfs. Reportedly the speedup is very noticeable.
+
+
+Filters
+~~~~~~~
+
+The filters are applied in the order as listed below. The <command>
+argument is always evaluated in the shell context using the 'eval' command
+(with the notable exception of the commit filter, for technical reasons).
+Prior to that, the `$GIT_COMMIT` environment variable will be set to contain
+the id of the commit being rewritten. Also, GIT_AUTHOR_NAME,
+GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_NAME, GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL,
+and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE are taken from the current commit and exported to
+the environment, in order to affect the author and committer identities of
+the replacement commit created by linkgit:git-commit-tree[1] after the
+filters have run.
+
+If any evaluation of <command> returns a non-zero exit status, the whole
+operation will be aborted.
+
+A 'map' function is available that takes an "original sha1 id" argument
+and outputs a "rewritten sha1 id" if the commit has been already
+rewritten, and "original sha1 id" otherwise; the 'map' function can
+return several ids on separate lines if your commit filter emitted
+multiple commits.
+
+
+OPTIONS
+-------
+
+--setup <command>::
+ This is not a real filter executed for each commit but a one
+ time setup just before the loop. Therefore no commit-specific
+ variables are defined yet. Functions or variables defined here
+ can be used or modified in the following filter steps except
+ the commit filter, for technical reasons.
+
+--subdirectory-filter <directory>::
+ Only look at the history which touches the given subdirectory.
+ The result will contain that directory (and only that) as its
+ project root. Implies <<Remap_to_ancestor>>.
+
+--env-filter <command>::
+ This filter may be used if you only need to modify the environment
+ in which the commit will be performed. Specifically, you might
+ want to rewrite the author/committer name/email/time environment
+ variables (see linkgit:git-commit-tree[1] for details).
+
+--tree-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for rewriting the tree and its contents.
+ The argument is evaluated in shell with the working
+ directory set to the root of the checked out tree. The new tree
+ is then used as-is (new files are auto-added, disappeared files
+ are auto-removed - neither .gitignore files nor any other ignore
+ rules *HAVE ANY EFFECT*!).
+
+--index-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for rewriting the index. It is similar to the
+ tree filter but does not check out the tree, which makes it much
+ faster. Frequently used with `git rm --cached
+ --ignore-unmatch ...`, see EXAMPLES below. For hairy
+ cases, see linkgit:git-update-index[1].
+
+--parent-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for rewriting the commit's parent list.
+ It will receive the parent string on stdin and shall output
+ the new parent string on stdout. The parent string is in
+ the format described in linkgit:git-commit-tree[1]: empty for
+ the initial commit, "-p parent" for a normal commit and
+ "-p parent1 -p parent2 -p parent3 ..." for a merge commit.
+
+--msg-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for rewriting the commit messages.
+ The argument is evaluated in the shell with the original
+ commit message on standard input; its standard output is
+ used as the new commit message.
+
+--commit-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for performing the commit.
+ If this filter is specified, it will be called instead of the
+ 'git commit-tree' command, with arguments of the form
+ "<TREE_ID> [(-p <PARENT_COMMIT_ID>)...]" and the log message on
+ stdin. The commit id is expected on stdout.
++
+As a special extension, the commit filter may emit multiple
+commit ids; in that case, the rewritten children of the original commit will
+have all of them as parents.
++
+You can use the 'map' convenience function in this filter, and other
+convenience functions, too. For example, calling 'skip_commit "$@"'
+will leave out the current commit (but not its changes! If you want
+that, use 'git rebase' instead).
++
+You can also use the `git_commit_non_empty_tree "$@"` instead of
+`git commit-tree "$@"` if you don't wish to keep commits with a single parent
+and that makes no change to the tree.
+
+--tag-name-filter <command>::
+ This is the filter for rewriting tag names. When passed,
+ it will be called for every tag ref that points to a rewritten
+ object (or to a tag object which points to a rewritten object).
+ The original tag name is passed via standard input, and the new
+ tag name is expected on standard output.
++
+The original tags are not deleted, but can be overwritten;
+use "--tag-name-filter cat" to simply update the tags. In this
+case, be very careful and make sure you have the old tags
+backed up in case the conversion has run afoul.
++
+Nearly proper rewriting of tag objects is supported. If the tag has
+a message attached, a new tag object will be created with the same message,
+author, and timestamp. If the tag has a signature attached, the
+signature will be stripped. It is by definition impossible to preserve
+signatures. The reason this is "nearly" proper, is because ideally if
+the tag did not change (points to the same object, has the same name, etc.)
+it should retain any signature. That is not the case, signatures will always
+be removed, buyer beware. There is also no support for changing the
+author or timestamp (or the tag message for that matter). Tags which point
+to other tags will be rewritten to point to the underlying commit.
+
+--prune-empty::
+ Some filters will generate empty commits that leave the tree untouched.
+ This option instructs git-filter-branch to remove such commits if they
+ have exactly one or zero non-pruned parents; merge commits will
+ therefore remain intact. This option cannot be used together with
+ `--commit-filter`, though the same effect can be achieved by using the
+ provided `git_commit_non_empty_tree` function in a commit filter.
+
+--original <namespace>::
+ Use this option to set the namespace where the original commits
+ will be stored. The default value is 'refs/original'.
+
+-d <directory>::
+ Use this option to set the path to the temporary directory used for
+ rewriting. When applying a tree filter, the command needs to
+ temporarily check out the tree to some directory, which may consume
+ considerable space in case of large projects. By default it
+ does this in the `.git-rewrite/` directory but you can override
+ that choice by this parameter.
+
+-f::
+--force::
+ 'git filter-branch' refuses to start with an existing temporary
+ directory or when there are already refs starting with
+ 'refs/original/', unless forced.
+
+--state-branch <branch>::
+ This option will cause the mapping from old to new objects to
+ be loaded from named branch upon startup and saved as a new
+ commit to that branch upon exit, enabling incremental of large
+ trees. If '<branch>' does not exist it will be created.
+
+<rev-list options>...::
+ Arguments for 'git rev-list'. All positive refs included by
+ these options are rewritten. You may also specify options
+ such as `--all`, but you must use `--` to separate them from
+ the 'git filter-branch' options. Implies <<Remap_to_ancestor>>.
+
+
+[[Remap_to_ancestor]]
+Remap to ancestor
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+By using linkgit:git-rev-list[1] arguments, e.g., path limiters, you can limit the
+set of revisions which get rewritten. However, positive refs on the command
+line are distinguished: we don't let them be excluded by such limiters. For
+this purpose, they are instead rewritten to point at the nearest ancestor that
+was not excluded.
+
+
+EXIT STATUS
+-----------
+
+On success, the exit status is `0`. If the filter can't find any commits to
+rewrite, the exit status is `2`. On any other error, the exit status may be
+any other non-zero value.
+
+
+EXAMPLES
+--------
+
+Suppose you want to remove a file (containing confidential information
+or copyright violation) from all commits:
+
+-------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm filename' HEAD
+-------------------------------------------------------
+
+However, if the file is absent from the tree of some commit,
+a simple `rm filename` will fail for that tree and commit.
+Thus you may instead want to use `rm -f filename` as the script.
+
+Using `--index-filter` with 'git rm' yields a significantly faster
+version. Like with using `rm filename`, `git rm --cached filename`
+will fail if the file is absent from the tree of a commit. If you
+want to "completely forget" a file, it does not matter when it entered
+history, so we also add `--ignore-unmatch`:
+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch filename' HEAD
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Now, you will get the rewritten history saved in HEAD.
+
+To rewrite the repository to look as if `foodir/` had been its project
+root, and discard all other history:
+
+-------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter foodir -- --all
+-------------------------------------------------------
+
+Thus you can, e.g., turn a library subdirectory into a repository of
+its own. Note the `--` that separates 'filter-branch' options from
+revision options, and the `--all` to rewrite all branches and tags.
+
+To set a commit (which typically is at the tip of another
+history) to be the parent of the current initial commit, in
+order to paste the other history behind the current history:
+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --parent-filter 'sed "s/^\$/-p <graft-id>/"' HEAD
+-------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+(if the parent string is empty - which happens when we are dealing with
+the initial commit - add graftcommit as a parent). Note that this assumes
+history with a single root (that is, no merge without common ancestors
+happened). If this is not the case, use:
+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --parent-filter \
+ 'test $GIT_COMMIT = <commit-id> && echo "-p <graft-id>" || cat' HEAD
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+or even simpler:
+
+-----------------------------------------------
+git replace --graft $commit-id $graft-id
+git filter-branch $graft-id..HEAD
+-----------------------------------------------
+
+To remove commits authored by "Darl McBribe" from the history:
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --commit-filter '
+ if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "Darl McBribe" ];
+ then
+ skip_commit "$@";
+ else
+ git commit-tree "$@";
+ fi' HEAD
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The function 'skip_commit' is defined as follows:
+
+--------------------------
+skip_commit()
+{
+ shift;
+ while [ -n "$1" ];
+ do
+ shift;
+ map "$1";
+ shift;
+ done;
+}
+--------------------------
+
+The shift magic first throws away the tree id and then the -p
+parameters. Note that this handles merges properly! In case Darl
+committed a merge between P1 and P2, it will be propagated properly
+and all children of the merge will become merge commits with P1,P2
+as their parents instead of the merge commit.
+
+*NOTE* the changes introduced by the commits, and which are not reverted
+by subsequent commits, will still be in the rewritten branch. If you want
+to throw out _changes_ together with the commits, you should use the
+interactive mode of 'git rebase'.
+
+You can rewrite the commit log messages using `--msg-filter`. For
+example, 'git svn-id' strings in a repository created by 'git svn' can
+be removed this way:
+
+-------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --msg-filter '
+ sed -e "/^git-svn-id:/d"
+'
+-------------------------------------------------------
+
+If you need to add 'Acked-by' lines to, say, the last 10 commits (none
+of which is a merge), use this command:
+
+--------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --msg-filter '
+ cat &&
+ echo "Acked-by: Bugs Bunny <bunny@bugzilla.org>"
+' HEAD~10..HEAD
+--------------------------------------------------------
+
+The `--env-filter` option can be used to modify committer and/or author
+identity. For example, if you found out that your commits have the wrong
+identity due to a misconfigured user.email, you can make a correction,
+before publishing the project, like this:
+
+--------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --env-filter '
+ if test "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "root@localhost"
+ then
+ GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=john@example.com
+ fi
+ if test "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "root@localhost"
+ then
+ GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=john@example.com
+ fi
+' -- --all
+--------------------------------------------------------
+
+To restrict rewriting to only part of the history, specify a revision
+range in addition to the new branch name. The new branch name will
+point to the top-most revision that a 'git rev-list' of this range
+will print.
+
+Consider this history:
+
+------------------
+ D--E--F--G--H
+ / /
+A--B-----C
+------------------
+
+To rewrite only commits D,E,F,G,H, but leave A, B and C alone, use:
+
+--------------------------------
+git filter-branch ... C..H
+--------------------------------
+
+To rewrite commits E,F,G,H, use one of these:
+
+----------------------------------------
+git filter-branch ... C..H --not D
+git filter-branch ... D..H --not C
+----------------------------------------
+
+To move the whole tree into a subdirectory, or remove it from there:
+
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+git filter-branch --index-filter \
+ 'git ls-files -s | sed "s-\t\"*-&newsubdir/-" |
+ GIT_INDEX_FILE=$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new \
+ git update-index --index-info &&
+ mv "$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"' HEAD
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+CHECKLIST FOR SHRINKING A REPOSITORY
+------------------------------------
+
+git-filter-branch can be used to get rid of a subset of files,
+usually with some combination of `--index-filter` and
+`--subdirectory-filter`. People expect the resulting repository to
+be smaller than the original, but you need a few more steps to
+actually make it smaller, because Git tries hard not to lose your
+objects until you tell it to. First make sure that:
+
+* You really removed all variants of a filename, if a blob was moved
+ over its lifetime. `git log --name-only --follow --all -- filename`
+ can help you find renames.
+
+* You really filtered all refs: use `--tag-name-filter cat -- --all`
+ when calling git-filter-branch.
+
+Then there are two ways to get a smaller repository. A safer way is
+to clone, that keeps your original intact.
+
+* Clone it with `git clone file:///path/to/repo`. The clone
+ will not have the removed objects. See linkgit:git-clone[1]. (Note
+ that cloning with a plain path just hardlinks everything!)
+
+If you really don't want to clone it, for whatever reasons, check the
+following points instead (in this order). This is a very destructive
+approach, so *make a backup* or go back to cloning it. You have been
+warned.
+
+* Remove the original refs backed up by git-filter-branch: say `git
+ for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -n 1 git
+ update-ref -d`.
+
+* Expire all reflogs with `git reflog expire --expire=now --all`.
+
+* Garbage collect all unreferenced objects with `git gc --prune=now`
+ (or if your git-gc is not new enough to support arguments to
+ `--prune`, use `git repack -ad; git prune` instead).
+
+[[PERFORMANCE]]
+PERFORMANCE
+-----------
+
+The performance of git-filter-branch is glacially slow; its design makes it
+impossible for a backward-compatible implementation to ever be fast:
+
+* In editing files, git-filter-branch by design checks out each and
+ every commit as it existed in the original repo. If your repo has
+ `10^5` files and `10^5` commits, but each commit only modifies five
+ files, then git-filter-branch will make you do `10^10` modifications,
+ despite only having (at most) `5*10^5` unique blobs.
+
+* If you try and cheat and try to make git-filter-branch only work on
+ files modified in a commit, then two things happen
+
+ ** you run into problems with deletions whenever the user is simply
+ trying to rename files (because attempting to delete files that
+ don't exist looks like a no-op; it takes some chicanery to remap
+ deletes across file renames when the renames happen via arbitrary
+ user-provided shell)
+
+ ** even if you succeed at the map-deletes-for-renames chicanery, you
+ still technically violate backward compatibility because users
+ are allowed to filter files in ways that depend upon topology of
+ commits instead of filtering solely based on file contents or
+ names (though this has not been observed in the wild).
+
+* Even if you don't need to edit files but only want to e.g. rename or
+ remove some and thus can avoid checking out each file (i.e. you can
+ use --index-filter), you still are passing shell snippets for your
+ filters. This means that for every commit, you have to have a
+ prepared git repo where those filters can be run. That's a
+ significant setup.
+
+* Further, several additional files are created or updated per commit
+ by git-filter-branch. Some of these are for supporting the
+ convenience functions provided by git-filter-branch (such as map()),
+ while others are for keeping track of internal state (but could have
+ also been accessed by user filters; one of git-filter-branch's
+ regression tests does so). This essentially amounts to using the
+ filesystem as an IPC mechanism between git-filter-branch and the
+ user-provided filters. Disks tend to be a slow IPC mechanism, and
+ writing these files also effectively represents a forced
+ synchronization point between separate processes that we hit with
+ every commit.
+
+* The user-provided shell commands will likely involve a pipeline of
+ commands, resulting in the creation of many processes per commit.
+ Creating and running another process takes a widely varying amount
+ of time between operating systems, but on any platform it is very
+ slow relative to invoking a function.
+
+* git-filter-branch itself is written in shell, which is kind of slow.
+ This is the one performance issue that could be backward-compatibly
+ fixed, but compared to the above problems that are intrinsic to the
+ design of git-filter-branch, the language of the tool itself is a
+ relatively minor issue.
+
+ ** Side note: Unfortunately, people tend to fixate on the
+ written-in-shell aspect and periodically ask if git-filter-branch
+ could be rewritten in another language to fix the performance
+ issues. Not only does that ignore the bigger intrinsic problems
+ with the design, it'd help less than you'd expect: if
+ git-filter-branch itself were not shell, then the convenience
+ functions (map(), skip_commit(), etc) and the `--setup` argument
+ could no longer be executed once at the beginning of the program
+ but would instead need to be prepended to every user filter (and
+ thus re-executed with every commit).
+
+The https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/[git filter-repo] tool is
+an alternative to git-filter-branch which does not suffer from these
+performance problems or the safety problems (mentioned below). For those
+with existing tooling which relies upon git-filter-branch, 'git
+filter-repo' also provides
+https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/blob/master/contrib/filter-repo-demos/filter-lamely[filter-lamely],
+a drop-in git-filter-branch replacement (with a few caveats). While
+filter-lamely suffers from all the same safety issues as
+git-filter-branch, it at least ameliorates the performance issues a
+little.
+
+[[SAFETY]]
+SAFETY
+------
+
+git-filter-branch is riddled with gotchas resulting in various ways to
+easily corrupt repos or end up with a mess worse than what you started
+with:
+
+* Someone can have a set of "working and tested filters" which they
+ document or provide to a coworker, who then runs them on a different
+ OS where the same commands are not working/tested (some examples in
+ the git-filter-branch manpage are also affected by this).
+ BSD vs. GNU userland differences can really bite. If lucky, error
+ messages are spewed. But just as likely, the commands either don't
+ do the filtering requested, or silently corrupt by making some
+ unwanted change. The unwanted change may only affect a few commits,
+ so it's not necessarily obvious either. (The fact that problems
+ won't necessarily be obvious means they are likely to go unnoticed
+ until the rewritten history is in use for quite a while, at which
+ point it's really hard to justify another flag-day for another
+ rewrite.)
+
+* Filenames with spaces are often mishandled by shell snippets since
+ they cause problems for shell pipelines. Not everyone is familiar
+ with find -print0, xargs -0, git-ls-files -z, etc. Even people who
+ are familiar with these may assume such flags are not relevant
+ because someone else renamed any such files in their repo back
+ before the person doing the filtering joined the project. And
+ often, even those familiar with handling arguments with spaces may
+ not do so just because they aren't in the mindset of thinking about
+ everything that could possibly go wrong.
+
+* Non-ascii filenames can be silently removed despite being in a
+ desired directory. Keeping only wanted paths is often done using
+ pipelines like `git ls-files | grep -v ^WANTED_DIR/ | xargs git rm`.
+ ls-files will only quote filenames if needed, so folks may not
+ notice that one of the files didn't match the regex (at least not
+ until it's much too late). Yes, someone who knows about
+ core.quotePath can avoid this (unless they have other special
+ characters like \t, \n, or "), and people who use ls-files -z with
+ something other than grep can avoid this, but that doesn't mean they
+ will.
+
+* Similarly, when moving files around, one can find that filenames
+ with non-ascii or special characters end up in a different
+ directory, one that includes a double quote character. (This is
+ technically the same issue as above with quoting, but perhaps an
+ interesting different way that it can and has manifested as a
+ problem.)
+
+* It's far too easy to accidentally mix up old and new history. It's
+ still possible with any tool, but git-filter-branch almost
+ invites it. If lucky, the only downside is users getting frustrated
+ that they don't know how to shrink their repo and remove the old
+ stuff. If unlucky, they merge old and new history and end up with
+ multiple "copies" of each commit, some of which have unwanted or
+ sensitive files and others which don't. This comes about in
+ multiple different ways:
+
+ ** the default to only doing a partial history rewrite ('--all' is not
+ the default and few examples show it)
+
+ ** the fact that there's no automatic post-run cleanup
+
+ ** the fact that --tag-name-filter (when used to rename tags) doesn't
+ remove the old tags but just adds new ones with the new name
+
+ ** the fact that little educational information is provided to inform
+ users of the ramifications of a rewrite and how to avoid mixing old
+ and new history. For example, this man page discusses how users
+ need to understand that they need to rebase their changes for all
+ their branches on top of new history (or delete and reclone), but
+ that's only one of multiple concerns to consider. See the
+ "DISCUSSION" section of the git filter-repo manual page for more
+ details.
+
+* Annotated tags can be accidentally converted to lightweight tags,
+ due to either of two issues:
+
+ ** Someone can do a history rewrite, realize they messed up, restore
+ from the backups in refs/original/, and then redo their
+ git-filter-branch command. (The backup in refs/original/ is not a
+ real backup; it dereferences tags first.)
+
+ ** Running git-filter-branch with either --tags or --all in your
+ <rev-list options>. In order to retain annotated tags as
+ annotated, you must use --tag-name-filter (and must not have
+ restored from refs/original/ in a previously botched rewrite).
+
+* Any commit messages that specify an encoding will become corrupted
+ by the rewrite; git-filter-branch ignores the encoding, takes the
+ original bytes, and feeds it to commit-tree without telling it the
+ proper encoding. (This happens whether or not --msg-filter is
+ used.)
+
+* Commit messages (even if they are all UTF-8) by default become
+ corrupted due to not being updated -- any references to other commit
+ hashes in commit messages will now refer to no-longer-extant
+ commits.
+
+* There are no facilities for helping users find what unwanted crud
+ they should delete, which means they are much more likely to have
+ incomplete or partial cleanups that sometimes result in confusion
+ and people wasting time trying to understand. (For example, folks
+ tend to just look for big files to delete instead of big directories
+ or extensions, and once they do so, then sometime later folks using
+ the new repository who are going through history will notice a build
+ artifact directory that has some files but not others, or a cache of
+ dependencies (node_modules or similar) which couldn't have ever been
+ functional since it's missing some files.)
+
+* If --prune-empty isn't specified, then the filtering process can
+ create hoards of confusing empty commits
+
+* If --prune-empty is specified, then intentionally placed empty
+ commits from before the filtering operation are also pruned instead
+ of just pruning commits that became empty due to filtering rules.
+
+* If --prune-empty is specified, sometimes empty commits are missed
+ and left around anyway (a somewhat rare bug, but it happens...)
+
+* A minor issue, but users who have a goal to update all names and
+ emails in a repository may be led to --env-filter which will only
+ update authors and committers, missing taggers.
+
+* If the user provides a --tag-name-filter that maps multiple tags to
+ the same name, no warning or error is provided; git-filter-branch
+ simply overwrites each tag in some undocumented pre-defined order
+ resulting in only one tag at the end. (A git-filter-branch
+ regression test requires this surprising behavior.)
+
+Also, the poor performance of git-filter-branch often leads to safety
+issues:
+
+* Coming up with the correct shell snippet to do the filtering you
+ want is sometimes difficult unless you're just doing a trivial
+ modification such as deleting a couple files. Unfortunately, people
+ often learn if the snippet is right or wrong by trying it out, but
+ the rightness or wrongness can vary depending on special
+ circumstances (spaces in filenames, non-ascii filenames, funny
+ author names or emails, invalid timezones, presence of grafts or
+ replace objects, etc.), meaning they may have to wait a long time,
+ hit an error, then restart. The performance of git-filter-branch is
+ so bad that this cycle is painful, reducing the time available to
+ carefully re-check (to say nothing about what it does to the
+ patience of the person doing the rewrite even if they do technically
+ have more time available). This problem is extra compounded because
+ errors from broken filters may not be shown for a long time and/or
+ get lost in a sea of output. Even worse, broken filters often just
+ result in silent incorrect rewrites.
+
+* To top it all off, even when users finally find working commands,
+ they naturally want to share them. But they may be unaware that
+ their repo didn't have some special cases that someone else's does.
+ So, when someone else with a different repository runs the same
+ commands, they get hit by the problems above. Or, the user just
+ runs commands that really were vetted for special cases, but they
+ run it on a different OS where it doesn't work, as noted above.
+
+GIT
+---
+Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite