Re: git-pull from git.git - no remote ref for pu or next?

[Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
>> 
>>> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
>>> 
>>>> But it would become a non-problem when the HTTP transport would learn 
>>>> to read and interpret the .idx files, basically constructing thin 
>>>> packs from parts of the .pack files ("Content-Range:" comes to 
>>>> mind)...
>>> 
>>> Woooh.
>> 
>> Does that mean "Yes, I'll do it"? ;-)
> 
> Umm. I hope it means "Woooh, that's crazy talk".
> 
> You do realize that then you need to teach the http-walker about walking 
> the delta chain all the way up? For big pulls, you're going to be a lot 
> _slower_ than just downloading the whole dang thing, because the delta 
> objects are often just ~40 bytes, and you've now added a ping-pong latency 
> for each such small transfer.
> 
> You don't need to download many such small ranges, and suddenly the few 
> hundred ping-pongs that got you a few tens of kB of data took longer than 
> just downloading a big stream efficiently that got you everything.

While I think the problem is much better solved by having "archive" pack(s)
and "current" pack, perhaps with always sownloading the whole delta it
would be feasible?

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git