Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Example Cogito Addon - cogito-bundle

From: Shawn Pearce <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:41:43 -0400

Linus Torvalds <[email-masked]> wrote:
> There are bigger reasons to _never_ allow packs to contain deltas to 
> outside of themselves:
> 
>  - there's no point. 

Actually there is a point to storing thin packs.  When I pull from
a remote repo (or push to a remote repo) a huge number of objects
and the target disk that is about to receive that huge number of
loose objects is slooooooooow I would rather just store the thin
pack then store the loose objects.

Ideally that thin pack would be repacked (along with the other
existing packs) as quickly as possible into a self-contained pack.
But that of course is unlikely to happen in practice; especially
on a push.
 
>  - it's a bad design. 
> 
>    In other words, it has potentially _serious_ downsides.

Yes, it does.

But it could also be useful when you fetch 20k+ objects onto a
Windows system or push 1k+ objects onto the slowest NFS system I
have ever seen...  where writing file data (aka packs) is reasonable
but creating or deleting files takes nearly 1 second per file.
I don't want to kill the better part of an hour waiting for a push
to complete!

-- 
Shawn.