Re: Confused over packfile and index design

[Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 10:30, Steven E. Harris <seh@panix.com> wrote:
> Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> writes:
>> Its meant to tell us how many bytes to malloc() in order to hold the
>> result of the libz inflate() call when the object is being read from
>> the packfile. That way we don't under or over allocate the result
>> buffer.
>
> Does Git always inflate the objects into an in-memory buffer?

Yes.

> As the
> size of these objects can be very large (given the variable-length size
> encoding), is there any provision to inflate the object to a temporary
> file?

Not currently. If you don't have enough memory for the malloc() buffer
of a big object, Git dies with an out of memory error.

-- 
Shawn.