Re: git-index-pack really does suck..

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Dana How wrote:
> 
> Larger and larger pack files make me nervous.
> They are expensive to manipulate,
> and >2GB requires a file format change.

It sometimes also requires a new filesystem. There are a lot of 
filesystems that can handle more than 4GB total, but not necessarily in a 
single file.

The only really useful such filesystem is probably FAT, which is still 
quite useful for things like USB memory sticks. But that is probably 
already worth supporting.

So I think we want to support 64-bit (or at least something like 40+ bit) 
pack-files, but yes, I think that even if/when we support it, we still 
want to support the "multiple smaller pack-files" schenario exactly 
because for some uses it's much *better* to have ten 2GB packfiles rather 
than one 20GB pack-file.

			Linus