Re: Possible bug with branch names and case sensitivity

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 11/22/2011 06:31 PM, Jay Soffian wrote:
> I wonder what the downside would be of always using packed refs on
> case-insenstive file systems. This would seem analogous to how git no
> longer uses symlinks.

The theoretical downside is that when the total number of packed refs is
very large, it is more expensive to access or change a single ref if it
is packed than if it is loose (because the whole packed refs file has to
be read, parsed, then rewritten, and thus scales like O(N)).  OTOH the
number of references must be quite large before loose references win,
because the constant factor for loose references is much larger than
that for packed references.  I also believe that there is still scope
for optimizing the handling of packed references to make them yet faster
and perhaps even improve their scaling.

But I think that a lot of code would have to change to make this happen.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/