Re: Git as a filesystem

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Eric Wong wrote:

> Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Peter Stahlir wrote:
> > 
> > > This is was I was looking for. My motivation is whether it is possible
> > > to run a system, for example Debian on a computer on top of gitfs,
> > > and then have a huge mirror on it, for example a complete 252GB
> > > Debian mirror as space efficient as possible.
> > > 
> > > I wonder how big a deltified Debian mirror in one pack file would be. :)
> > 
> > It would be just as big as the non gitified storage on disk.
> > 
> > The space saving with git comes from efficient delta storage of 
> > _versioned_ files, i.e. multiple nearly identical versions of the same 
> > file where the stored delta is only the small difference between the 
> > first full version and subsequent versions.  Unless you plan on storing 
> > many different Debian versions together, you won't benefit from any 
> > delta at all. And since Debian packages are already compressed, git 
> > won't be able to compress them further.
> > 
> > So don't waste your time.
> 
> On a similar note, has anybody experimented with using git to
> store maildirs or news spools?  I'd imagine the quoted portions of
> most message threads could be delta-compressed quite efficiently.

I store all my mail in a git repository.  Works beautifully.  Except that 
the buffers on my laptop are constantly full :-(  So a simple commit takes 
some waiting.

Should be no issue on normal (desktop) machines.

Ciao,
Dscho