git gc and idle times

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 04:06:28PM +0200, Thomas Moschny wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we are using cgit 0.9 successfully on a bunch of repositories. Nice
> tool!
> 
> One question however: After running git-gc on some of the repositories,
> the overview page of cgit misses idle times for those. The idle time is
> back after pushing a commit. Is there something that needs to be
> adjusted/fixed manually after running git-gc? Or is it a bug of cgit?

cgit uses the mtime of the file containing the default branch's HEAD ref
to guess the idle time if there's no agefile. If you pack heads and tags
there won't be such a file anymore, resulting in no idle time being
displayed.

You could try to set "gc.packrefs" to "notbare" to prevent the garbage
collector from packing refs as a workaround.