Re: Git as a filesystem

From: Peter Stahlir <peter.stahlir@googlemail.com>
Date: Sep 21, 2007, 13:28 UTC
Message-ID: <fbe8b1780709210628u24c14117p5174bedb3d1912cb@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20070921125337.GA28456@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

> > I wonder how big a deltified Debian mirror in one pack file would
> > be. :)
>
> Very, very close to 252 GB, since .deb files are already compressed.

Yes, but if there were deb and tar support in git (to automatically unpack archives and store the contents), together with the best available binary diffs I think the repository could be significantly smaller because files common to all architectures could be deltified,

I did a quick check with 100MB of deb archives; the result was nearly 100MB as you said. I also did a quick check with all .so files in my /usr/lib directory; it shrunk from 50MB to 20MB, the same is achieved with tar + bz2.

But the thing is, I think there is a lot of redundancy in a) a Debian mirror or b) your disk at home.

Telling git to handle -for example- deb archives and storing everything in a pack file would take advantage of redundancy across _all_ files. So the /usr/share/doc of all architectures could be compressed.

Right?