Re: What's up with the GIT archive on www.kernel.org?

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
>> > 
>> > Absolutely. The mirroring has been slow again lately. I've packed my 
>> > archive, but I suspect others should much more aggressively now be using 
>> > the "objects/info/alternates" information to point to my tree, so that 
>> > they don't even need to have their objects at all (no packing 
>> > even necessary - just running "git prune-packed" on peoples archives 
>> > would get rid of any duplicate objects when I pack mine).
>> 
>> Can you post a small description how to utilize this method?
>
> Just do
>
> 	echo /pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git/objects > objects/info/alternates
>
> in your tree, and that will tell git that your tree can use my object 
> directory as an "alternate" source of objects. At that point, you can 
> remove all objects that I have.
>
> However, that only works with a local directory - you can't say that the
> alternate object directory is over the network (unless you use NFS or
> similar, of course ;).
>
> Another potential problem is that while the above makes git understand to
> pick the objects from my directory, it can in theory cause problems for
> mirrors etc - since they mirror things to a different location and/or may
> not mirror all of it anyway.

And probably it would break fetching over dumb transports.