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I scanned all of GitHub's "oops commits" for leaked secrets

(trufflesecurity.com)
199 points elza_1111 | 1 comments | 03 Jul 25 06:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.345s | source
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SillyUsername ◴[03 Jul 25 07:01 UTC] No.44452402[source]▶
Git never forgets, this isn't really a shocking revelation.
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tux3 ◴[03 Jul 25 07:17 UTC] No.44452484[source]▶
Git does forget, it has a gc mechanism specifically for forgetting.

GitHub can't use the native git gc, and apparently doesn't have their own fork-aware and weird-cross-repo-merge-aware gc, so they might just not have built a way to track which commits are dangling.

But that's not obvious at all.

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1. SillyUsername ◴[03 Jul 25 12:31 UTC] No.44454335[source]▶
Ah right, so forking the codebase, then deleting the original repo forces git to forget all copies. Gotcha thanks for the enlightenment.