Re: RFC: adding xdelta compression to git

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: May 3, 2005, 04:12 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.62.0505030008070.14033@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <200505030657.38309.alonz@nolaviz.org>

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Alon Ziv wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Looking for novel methods of wasting my time :), I am considering adding 
> xdelta to git.
> 
> I have two concrete proposals, both of which (IMO) are consistent with the git 
> philosophy:
> 
> 1. Add a git-deltify command, which will take two trees and replace the second 
> tree's blobs with delta-blobs referring to the first tree. Each delta-blob is 
> self-contained; from the outside it looks like any other blob, but internally 
> it contains another blob reference + an xdelta. The only function which would 
> need to understand the new format would be unpack_sha1_file.

[....]

Guess what?

That's exactly what I did, except that I used libxdiff, stripped it to the bare minimum and even optimized it to be as efficient (i.e. fast) as possible given the git environment.

I'm finalizing the code right now.

Nicolas