Re: Handling large files with GIT

[Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

On 2/15/06, Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net> wrote:
> Excellent.  Any speculations on where they might fit?  Clearly, it needs
> to be out of the "tree".

I think Junio & Linus are talking about alternative mergers, something
that can be called instead of git-read-tree -m (which is the way
merges seem to kick off). Or perhaps an additional flag to
git-read-tree to be used in conjunction with -m, something like
--optimize-for-identity that lets git-read-tree know to do a first
pass keying things on file identity rather than file path.

So we are _not_ touching the object database, at all. Only optimising
merges for very large trees there mv is a popular operation. All the
cases you discuss can be tackled very efficiently without making *any*
change to the object database.

> Martin, is that enough for your CVS case?

Oh, I don't need it at all. It's just that there's been some lazy talk
of tracking mboxes and maildirs with git, and look where it's led.
Blame Roland Stigge who got me started down this track.

I'm sure it's because the other optimisations are a lot harder to
tackle ;-) though Linus mentions that it'd be trivial for
git-read-tree -m to detect unchanged directories and perhaps do things
a bit faster. Not as revolutionary as an --optimize-for-identity but
not as risky either.

In any case, don't count in me for any of this git-checkout hacking. I
know better than start learning C posting patches to *this* list.

cheers,


martin