Re: Git as a filesystem

[Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>]

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Peter Stahlir wrote:
> 
> > This is was I was looking for. My motivation is whether it is possible
> > to run a system, for example Debian on a computer on top of gitfs,
> > and then have a huge mirror on it, for example a complete 252GB
> > Debian mirror as space efficient as possible.
> > 
> > I wonder how big a deltified Debian mirror in one pack file would be. :)
> 
> It would be just as big as the non gitified storage on disk.
> 
> The space saving with git comes from efficient delta storage of 
> _versioned_ files, i.e. multiple nearly identical versions of the same 
> file where the stored delta is only the small difference between the 
> first full version and subsequent versions.  Unless you plan on storing 
> many different Debian versions together, you won't benefit from any 
> delta at all. And since Debian packages are already compressed, git 
> won't be able to compress them further.
> 
> So don't waste your time.

On a similar note, has anybody experimented with using git to
store maildirs or news spools?  I'd imagine the quoted portions of
most message threads could be delta-compressed quite efficiently.

-- 
Eric Wong