From: David Lang Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:31:45 GMT Subject: Re: git-index-pack really does suck.. Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Dana How wrote: >> >> Larger and larger pack files make me nervous. >> They are expensive to manipulate, >> and >2GB requires a file format change. > > It sometimes also requires a new filesystem. There are a lot of > filesystems that can handle more than 4GB total, but not necessarily in a > single file. > > The only really useful such filesystem is probably FAT, which is still > quite useful for things like USB memory sticks. But that is probably > already worth supporting. > > So I think we want to support 64-bit (or at least something like 40+ bit) > pack-files, but yes, I think that even if/when we support it, we still > want to support the "multiple smaller pack-files" schenario exactly > because for some uses it's much *better* to have ten 2GB packfiles rather > than one 20GB pack-file. however, for historical archives you may end up with wanting to do a 2GB packfile of 'recent' stuff, and a 14GB packfile of 'ancient' stuff (with the large one built with all space-saving options turned up all the way, no matter how much time it takes to build the pack) David Lang