Re: Git as a filesystem

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Peter Stahlir wrote:

> > > 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.
> 
> The 252GB stem from the fact that there are more than 10 architectures.
> I guess the /usr/share/doc of all architectures could be deltified (as could
> be all files that are architecture-independent)
> 
> Right?

Indeed.

But how much does this represents, once compressed, compared to the 
rest?  I doubt it is significant enough for the trouble.


Nicolas