Re: Dealing with many many git repos in a /home directory

Alex Riesen <raa.lkml <at> gmail.com> writes:

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 09:29, demerphq <demerphq <at> gmail.com> wrote:

quoted

Would i be correct in thinking that if i have to repos with an
equivalent  .git/objects/../..... file in them that the files are
necessarily identical and one can be replaced by a hardlink to the
other?

Yes, but you probably wont save as much as you'd like: think about the
users
who *do* repack their repositories. The .pack files will be all
different.

Maybe you can:

for each repo
  clone it to some place
  pack it with gc --aggressive
  take the resulting pack and move it (and the associated index) somewhere
  make in the same place a file with the same hash as the pack and extension
    keep and possibly, inside, some note about its content (e.q. what repo
    was cloned and at what state/time it was so frozen).
  ask the users to go in the .git/objects/packs dir of their private copy
    of the corresponding repo and hardlink there the .pack, .idx, .keep
    file that you have prepared
  ask the users to invoke git gc

Before actually doing that on something important, maybe wait have the
confirmation from some developer that there is not something flawed in the
approach.

Personally, I tend to use keep files a lot because I need to keep two
machines synchronized using "unison". Without keep files, large packs are
changed at every gc and the synchronization takes ages. By "freezing" a
stable subset of my objects I maintain the changing packs much smaller and
reduce the amount of data that needs to be carried over by unison to keep
the two machines in sync.