Re: git-index-pack really does suck..

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 3, 2007, 22:52 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704031544110.6730@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <56b7f5510704031540i4df918e6g5a82389b6759c50b@mail.gmail.com>

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.

			Linus