From: Linus Torvalds Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:52:32 GMT Subject: Re: git-index-pack really does suck.. Message-ID: 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