From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 04:08:49 GMT
Subject: Re: "git-send-pack"
Message-ID: <42C61351.10306@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0507011831060.2977@ppc970.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> Also, the number of people involved isn't _that_ big. We're talking a few
> thousand people who actively would update their trees for a big project,
> and many smaller projects have anything from a couple to maybe a hundred. 
> A few mirrors, and you don't have any problem.
> 
> So I think that the problem is actually not that big, and we just need to
> find an acceptable format. Quite frankly, it might be perfectly acceptable
> for kernel.org to run a simple packing script once a week which packs
> everything into one single file, and even if that means that the mirrors
> will have to re-get everything once a week, that actually sounds 
> acceptable.
> 
> It's obviously a _stupid_ way to handle the rsync problem, so there's 
> bound to be some cleaner solution, but the point is that we can probably 
> make mirroring acceptable even with a really really stupid approach. I'd 
> be a bit ashamed of just how ugly it is, but it would likely _work_ fine.
> You'd create 52 pack-files in a year, but each pack-file is likely just
> ten megabytes each. 
> 

Any reason not to simply append objects to an existing packfile?  It 
really seems like an easy solutions, and should have relatively good I/O 
patterns to boot simply because it naturally creates a topological sort 
of the objects.

	-hpa