Re: "git-send-pack"

Linus Torvalds wrote:

..but that's not what we're looking for. I'm not looking for kernel.org to
be my distributed backup tape.

For it to be useful, it must do more than just log all activity and mirror
it out via rsync. It must also be usable for people pulling on it. Which
means that it has to be a valid git archive or at least easily
incrementally unpackable, so that people can actually use the end result.

A log of packs that are just incremented is certainly unpackable: you
teach git-unpack-objects to just unpack several packs after each other.  
But since it's not seekable, you'd have to unpack a 100MB compressed
archive just to get the last tip of it that you don't have unpacked yet.

Agreed, you also need an index file.  The index file can be recreated 
from the log file in case of corruption, but is what you'd use to seek 
directly to an object.

	-hpa