Re: [PATCH] multi item packed files

From: Krzysztof Halasa <khc@pm.waw.pl>
Date: Apr 22, 2005, 09:40 UTC
Message-ID: <m3vf6frvxu.fsf@defiant.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0504211301240.2344@ppc970.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> And dammit, if I'm the original author and likely biggest power-user, and 
> _I_ can't be bothered to use special filesystems, then who can? Nobody.

If someone is motivated enough, and if the task is quite trivial (as it seems to be) someone may try it. I can see nothing wrong with it as long as it doesn't affect other people.

> This is why I absolutely do not believe in arguments like "if your
> filesystem doesn't do tail packing, you shouldn't use it" or "if your
> don't have name hashing enabled in your filesystem it's broken".

Of course. But one may consider using a filesystem with, say, different settings. Or a special filesystem for this task, such as CNFS used by news servers (it seems news servers do quite the same what git does, except they also purge old contents, i.e., container files don't grow up).

> I'm perfectly willing to optimize for the common case, but that's as far 
> as it goes. I do not want to make fundamental design decisions that depend 
> on the target filesystem having some particular feature.

The optimization would be (in) the underlying filesystem (i.e., the OS thing, or possibly a shared preloaded library?), not git itself.

-- 
Krzysztof Halasa