From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Bryan Larsen Subject: using git without blobs in the object database Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 08:10:37 -0400 Message-ID: <42CD1BBD.8070306@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Thu Jul 07 14:30:16 2005 Return-path: Received: from vger.kernel.org ([12.107.209.244]) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1DqVVm-0003qn-Iy for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Thu, 07 Jul 2005 14:29:50 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261432AbVGGMZI (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:25:08 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261365AbVGGMXe (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:23:34 -0400 Received: from zproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.162.197]:27053 "EHLO zproxy.gmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261436AbVGGMUW (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:20:22 -0400 Received: by zproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id 8so78970nzo for ; Thu, 07 Jul 2005 05:20:18 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:user-agent:x-accept-language:mime-version:to:subject:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; b=D0hwXXj4E0q01p+C935sLsWnTAY0rZPnNbgwr4KvEHBualIL8JVd7SCeot1GBRKGtihCyy7yFmve1E0CwqG/Lfu3MjI+3wH7TncZfeFjYMrLTlk1qL3KuzIhGWBa070osMTvEBZ7rU1/C02x2xZ7K+Glm/FOod5tndcMQyOr6pY= Received: by 10.36.60.18 with SMTP id i18mr271678nza; Thu, 07 Jul 2005 05:20:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ?192.168.1.100? ([70.26.43.137]) by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id 7sm408505nzn.2005.07.07.05.20.18; Thu, 07 Jul 2005 05:20:18 -0700 (PDT) User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Macintosh/20050317) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en To: git@vger.kernel.org Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Use Case: A large set of large binary files, geographically distributed. Each location has some unique files, some identical files and some slightly modified files. I want to use git to tell me what changed and when. But I cannot afford to have it store the blobs in the object database, nor do I need to; knowing the signature of previous objects is good enough. It seems to me that most operations should work without these objects, and that some people do so. For instance, git-update-cache has a --cacheinfo option that facilitates this operation. But not all commands work so well. For instance, git-write-tree will fail if --cacheinfo was used to add a file. This failure is caused by a call to check_valid_sha1(). It appears that this check is not strictly necessary, just very useful for normal operation. Would a patch that added a flag "--disable-sha1-check" to git-write-tree be accepted? I hope that's all I need to add, but I haven't completed my evaluation yet. thanks, Bryan