Re: "git-send-pack"

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Also, the number of people involved isn't _that_ big. We're talking a few
thousand people who actively would update their trees for a big project,
and many smaller projects have anything from a couple to maybe a hundred. 
A few mirrors, and you don't have any problem.

So I think that the problem is actually not that big, and we just need to
find an acceptable format. Quite frankly, it might be perfectly acceptable
for kernel.org to run a simple packing script once a week which packs
everything into one single file, and even if that means that the mirrors
will have to re-get everything once a week, that actually sounds 
acceptable.

It's obviously a _stupid_ way to handle the rsync problem, so there's 
bound to be some cleaner solution, but the point is that we can probably 
make mirroring acceptable even with a really really stupid approach. I'd 
be a bit ashamed of just how ugly it is, but it would likely _work_ fine.
You'd create 52 pack-files in a year, but each pack-file is likely just
ten megabytes each. 

Any reason not to simply append objects to an existing packfile?  It 
really seems like an easy solutions, and should have relatively good I/O 
patterns to boot simply because it naturally creates a topological sort 
of the objects.

	-hpa