Re: GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY

From: Jörn Engel <joern@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de>
Date: Apr 18, 2006, 18:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20060418182650.GB25688@wohnheim.fh-wedel.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0604181104420.3701@g5.osdl.org>

On Tue, 18 April 2006 11:08:40 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Jörn Engel wrote:
> > > 
> > > 	git clone git://git.kernel.org/... foo/
> > 
> > Is it possible for non-owners of a kernel.org account to do this?
> 
> Yes, kernel.org runs the git daemon.

Excellent! I have a faint memory of hpa recently saying that the git daemon would be too resource-hungry. One of the cases where being wrong is a Good Thing.

Show 17 quoted lines

> > 
> > Well, .git/objects for your kernel still consumes 121M.  It's not
> > gigabytes but I still wouldn't want too many copies of that lying
> > around.
> 
> Right. However, these days we have better approaches than 
> GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY for that.
> 
> In particular, if you create local clones, use "git clone -l -s", which 
> shares its base objects with the thing you clone from. It makes the clone 
> incredibly fast too (the only real cost is the check-out, which can 
> obviously be pretty expensive), and you can then use
> 
> 	git repack -a -d -l
> 
> on all the to repack just the _local_ objects to avoid having packs 
> duplicate objects unnecessarily.

This still isn't good enough for me. Before git, all my trees were hard-linked (cowlinked, actually) and another copy barely consumed any space. "git clone -l -s" creates a copy of the currently 311M of kernel source, quite a bit more expensive.

But it appears as if I could "cp -lr" the git tree and work with that. The nice thing of having cowlinks is that I don't have to rely on git breaking the hard links - which it probably won't. But since the estimated user base of cowlinks is 1, that won't help too many people.

Jörn

-- 
Good warriors cause others to come to them and do not go to others.
-- Sun Tzu