| > The cumulative effect of rebase followed by gc is to delete commits that have a branch pointing to them. This is both false and irrelevant. It's false because after the rebase, the branch you just rebased won't point to the old commits. Unless you had other branches there, they would be orphaned. Also, according to the "Notes" section of the git-gc documentation [0]: > git gc tries very hard not to delete objects that are referenced anywhere in your repository. In particular, it will keep not only objects referenced by your current set of branches and tags, but also objects referenced by the index, remote-tracking branches, refs saved by git filter-branch in refs/original/, or reflogs (which may reference commits in branches that were later amended or rewound). Since the commit you were on before making the rebase is in the reflog, it will actually not be GCed (yet) even though there are no branches pointing to them. It's irrelevant because, even if it was true, as long as there are no more objects referencing that commit, it's perfectly eligible for gc. I don't understand your argument that "you can't have it both ways". [0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc |