Re: [rfc] git: combo-blobs

Ingo Molnar
2005-04-11T16:39:03Z

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:

> > Also, with a 'replicate the full object on every 8th commit'
> > rule the risk would be somewhat mitigated as well.
>
> ..but not the complexity.
>
> The fact is, I want to trust this thing. Dammit, one reason I like GIT
> is that I can mentally visualize the whole damn tree, and each step is
> so _simple_. That's extra important when the object database itself is
> so inscrutable - unlike CVS or SCCS or formats like that, it's damn
> hard to visualize from looking at a directory listing.

ok. Meanwhile i found another counter-argument: the average committed
file size is 36K, which with gzip -9 would compress down to roughly 8K,
with the commit message being another block. That's 2+1 blocks used per
commit, while with deltas one could at most cut this down to 1+1+1
blocks - just as much space! So we would be almost even with the more
complex delta approach, just by increasing the default compression ratio
from 6 to 9. (but even with the default we are not that bad.)

case closed i guess. (The network bandwith issue can/could indeed be
solved independently, without any impact to the fundamentals, as you
suggested.)

Ingo