Re: Git as a filesystem

Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Peter Stahlir wrote:

quoted

This is was I was looking for. My motivation is whether it is possible
to run a system, for example Debian on a computer on top of gitfs,
and then have a huge mirror on it, for example a complete 252GB
Debian mirror as space efficient as possible.

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.

On a similar note, has anybody experimented with using git to
store maildirs or news spools?  I'd imagine the quoted portions of
most message threads could be delta-compressed quite efficiently.

-- 
Eric Wong