Re: Git Large Object Support Proposal

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 19, 2009, 22:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7veiwt6t6a.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <d411cc4a0903191514n1e524ebava5895d708a2927c4@mail.gmail.com>

Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> But where Git instead stores a stub object and the large binary object
> is pulled in via a separate mechanism. I was thinking that the client
> could set a max file size and when a binary object larger than that is
> staged, Git instead writes a stub blob like:
>
> ==
> blob [size]\0
> [sha of large blob]
> ==

An immediate pair of questions are, if you can solve the issue by delegating large media to somebody else (i.e. "media server"), and that somebody else can solve the issues you are having, (1) what happens if you lower that "large" threashold to "0 byte"? Does that somebody else still work fine, and does the git that uses indirection also still work fine? If so why are you using git instead of that somebody else altogether? and (2) what prevents us from stealing the trick that somebody else uses so that git itself can natively handle large blobs without indirection?

Without thinking the ramifications through myself, this sounds pretty much like a band-aid and will nend up hitting the same "blob is larger than we can handle" issue when you follow the indirection eventually, but that is just my gut feeling.

This is an off-topic "By the way", but has another topic addressed to you on git-scm.com/about resolved in any way yet?