Re: Git as a filesystem

[jlh <jlh@gmx.ch>]

Peter Stahlir wrote:
> But the thing is, I think there is a lot of redundancy in
> a) a Debian mirror or

Yes, surely.  Your idea suggests that you want any file to be
reconstructed on-the-fly whenever it's being requested.  Isn't
there the danger of killing performance, the CPU being the
bottleneck?  I imagine such a debian mirror has quite some
traffic.

> b) your disk at home.

I doubt so.  There sure is lots of redundancy within each file and
that's what compressed file systems are good for.  But what you
talk about is redundancy across (unversioned) files, and I don't
feel there is a lot of it.  Yes, I might have a few copies of the
file COPYING on my disk, and maybe some of my sources share a few
functions, but this won't save me tons of space.  All my binaries,
libraries, MP3s, videos, config files, etc don't really have any
redundancy across file boundaries.  And even if there is, finding
that redundancy is an O(whatever-but-not-n) operation that would
be rather slow.

I definitely see gitfs (or similar ideas) as potentially being
useful in some cases (maybe debian mirrors could be one), but not
for my disk at home, which I generally would prefer to be faster
than more compressed.

jlh