Re: Make "git clone" less of a deathly quiet experience

[Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz>]

BTW, some historical (from the very channel beginning) logs of #git for
fun, profit and late night reading are available at
http://pasky.or.cz/~pasky/cp/%23git/, e.g. the 2006-02-10 early morning
features the King Penguin explaining the deepness and intricacies of
pack files construction! Don't miss the opportunity!

New files won't be world-readable by default, but I hope to get some
irclogger with cutesy web interface set up for #git.


Dear diary, on Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:48:55AM CET, I got a letter
where Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> said that...
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:
> 
> > Anyway, _something_ like this is definitely needed. It could certainly be 
> > better (if it showed the same kind of thing that git-unpack-objects did, 
> > that would be much nicer, but would require parsing the object stream as 
> > it comes in). But this is  big step forward, I think.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
> > ---
> >
> > Comments? Hate-mail? Improvements?
> 
> It probably should default to quiet if (!isatty(1)).

isatty(2) or something, 1 is in practice always a ref generator. Perhaps
it would be better not to clutter stderr, though; what about directly
opening /dev/tty? Does Cygwin support that?

> The real improvement, independent of this client-side patch,
> would be to reuse recently generated packs, but that needs
> writable cache directory on the server side.  Another thing that
> I stumbled upon last time I tried it was that it did not look
> totally trivial to modify the csum-file interface so that I can
> splice the output from it into two different destinations (one
> to cachefile, the other to the consumer).

Yes, I said that on IRC yesterday as well. I don't think even a cache is
needed; just look at the repository and say:

	* while there are packs containing only objects we are going to
	  send, pick the largest one and send it as-is.
	* if there is a pack with more than a 75% (totally arbitrary)
	  overlap with the objects we are going to send, send it as-is.
	* pack the loose objects.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
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