read-only working copy using symlinks to blobs

hi all, i'm looking into using git to manage a lot of very large binary data. git seems particularly suited to this task because it has features for saving disk space such as clone--shared, and it's fast due to simple compression by default (instead of deltas).

in my mind, there's still one major feature for working with large binaries that has not been addressed: the ability to check out symbolic/hard links to blobs into the working copy instead of creating duplicates of the files.

imagine a scenario where one user is putting large binary files into a git repo. 100 other users need read-only access to this repo. they clone the repo shared, which saves disk space for the object files, but each of these 100 working copies also creates copies of all the binary files at the HEAD revision. it would be 100x as efficient if, in place of these files, symbolic or hard links were made to the blob files in .git/objects.

the crux of the issue is that the blob objects would have to be stored as exact copies of the original files. i did some googling and it would seem there are two things that currently prevent this from happening. 1) blobs are stored with compression and 2) they include a small header. compression can be disabled by setting core.loosecompression to 0, so that seems like less of an issue. as for the header, wouldn't it be possible to store it as a separate file per blob object and thus keep the original data completely pristine?

what are the caveats to a system like this? any thoughts on the feasibility?

-chad