Re: [PATCH] RFC: git lazy clone proof-of-concept

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Jon Smirl wrote:

There's no fixed answer. We do various culling heurstics to avoid actually 
generating a diff at all if it looks unlikely to succeed etc. But in 
general, the way the window works is that 
 (a) we only need to generate the _unpacked_ object once
 (b) we compare each object to the "window-1" preceding objects, which is 
     how I got the O(windowsize^2) 
 (c) but then that "compare" relatively seldom involves actually 
     generating a whole diff!

So the answer is: in _theory_ each object may be compared to (windowsize-1) other objects, but in practice it's much less than that.

			Linus