Re: Errors cloning large repo

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mar 10, 2007, 22:21 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0703101414380.10330@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <82B0999F-73E8-494E-8D66-FEEEDA25FB91@adacore.com>

On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Geert Bosch wrote:

> 
> Larger packs might still be sent over the network, but they
> wouldn't have an index and could be constructed on the fly,
> without ever writing any multi-gigabyte files to disk.

I have to say, I think that's a good idea. Rather than supporting a 64-bit index, not generating big pack-files in general is probably a great idea.

For the streaming formats, we'd obviously generate arbitrarily large pack-files, but as you say, they never have an index at all, and the receiver always re-writes them *anyway* (ie we now always run "git-index-pack --fix-thin" on them), so we could just modify that "--fix-thin" logic to also split the pack when it reaches some arbitrary limit).

Some similar logic in git-pack-objects would mean that we'd never generate bigger packs in the first place..

It's not that 64-bit index file support is "wrong", but it does seem like it's not really necessary.

		Linus