A pack is a collection of objects, individually compressed, with delta compression applied, stored in a single file, with an associated index file.

Packs are used to reduce the load on mirror systems, backup engines, disk storage, etc.

-a

Instead of incrementally packing the unpacked objects, pack everything available into a single pack. Especially useful when packing a repository that is used for a private development and there no need to worry about people fetching via dumb protocols from it. Use with -d.

-d

After packing, if the newly created packs make some existing packs redundant, remove the redundant packs. Also runs git-prune-packed(1).

-l

Pass the --local option to git pack-objects, see git-pack-objects(1).

-f

Pass the --no-reuse-delta option to git pack-objects, see git-pack-objects(1).

-q

Pass the -q option to git pack-objects, see git-pack-objects(1).

-n

Do not update the server information with git update-server-info.

--window=[N], --depth=[N]

These two options affect how the objects contained in the pack are stored using delta compression. The objects are first internally sorted by type, size and optionally names and compared against the other objects within --window to see if using delta compression saves space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker side, because delta data needs to be applied that many times to get to the necessary object. The default value for both --window and --depth is 10.