From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:42:55 GMT Subject: Re: git pack/unpack over bittorrent - works! Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <4C7FC3DC.3060907@gmail.com> On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 4:33 PM, A Large Angry SCM wrote: > On 09/02/2010 09:37 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: >> >> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy >>  wrote: > > [...] >>> >>> There were discussions whether a pack is stable enough to >>> be shared like this, >> >>  it seems to be.  as long as each version of git produces the exact >> same pack object, off of the command "git pack-objects --all --stdout >> --thin {ref}<  {objref}" > > This is not guaranteed. ok. greeeat. so, some sensible questions: * what _can_ be guaranteed? * diffs? * git-format-patches? (which i am aware can do binary files and also rms)? * individual files in the .git/objects directory? and, asking perhaps some silly questions: * why is it not guaranteed? * under what circumstances is it not guaranteed? and, crucially, is it necessary to care? i.e. if someone does a shallow git clone, i couldn't give a stuff. * is it possible to _make_ the repository guaranteed to produce identical pack objects? * does for example "git gc" change the object store in such a way such that one git repo will produce a different pack-object from the same ref? if so, can running "git gc" prior to producing the pack-objects gurantee that the pack-objects will be the same? * is it a versioning issue? is it because there are different versions (2 and 3)? if so, that's ok, you just force people to use the same pack-object versions. etc. etc. l.