Re: Repacking many disconnected blobs

Keith Packard [off-list ref] wrote:

parsecvs scans every ,v file and creates a blob for every revision of
every file right up front. Once these are created, it discards the
actual file contents and deals solely with the hash values.

The problem is that while this is going on, the repository consists
solely of disconnected objects, and I can't make git-repack put those
into pack objects. This leaves the directories bloated, and operations
within the tree quite sluggish. I'm importing a project with 30000 files
and 30000 revisions (the CVS repository is about 700MB), and after
scanning the files, and constructing (in memory) a complete revision
history, the actual construction of the commits is happening at about 2
per second, and about 70% of that time is in the kernel, presumably
playing around in the repository.

I'm assuming that if I could get these disconnected blobs all neatly
tucked into a pack object, things might go a bit faster.

What about running git-update-index using .git/objects as the
current working directory and adding all files in ??/* into the
index, then git-write-tree that index and git-commit-tree the tree.

When you are done you have a bunch of orphan trees and a commit
but these shouldn't be very big and I'd guess would prune out with
a repack if you don't hold a ref to the orphan commit.

-- 
Shawn.