Re: [PATCH] RFC: git lazy clone proof-of-concept

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Sean napisał:
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:22:09 -0500 (EST)
> Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> wrote:
>
>> Finding out what those huge objects are, and if they actually need to be 
>> there, would be a good thing to do to reduce any repository size.
> 
> Okay, i've sent the sha1's of the top 500 to Jan for inspection.  It appears
> that many of the largest objects are automatically generated i18n files that
> could be regenerated from source files when needed rather than being checked
> in themselves; but that's for the OO folks to decide.

Good practice is to not add generated files to version control.
But sometimes such files are stored if regenerating them is costly
(./configure file in some cases, 'man' and 'html' branches in git.git).

IIRC Dana How tried also to deal with repository with large binary
files in repo, although in that case those had shallow history. IIRC
the proposed solution was to pack all such large objects undeltified
into separate "large-objects" kept pack.

You can mark large files with (undocumented except for RelNotes)
'delta' gitattribute, but I don't know if it would help in your
case.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland