Re: [PATCH 4/5] fast-export: Introduce --inline-blobs

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Ramkumar Ramachandra [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Introduce a new command-line option --inline-blobs that always inlines
blobs instead of referring to them via marks or their original SHA-1
hash.

[...]

Hmm, this smells somewhat fishy.

Wasn't G-F-I designed to be a common stream format for other SCMs to
generate streams, so that importers and exporters can be written once for
each SCM to interoperate?

Here is one way to sell it:

	With the inline blobs feature, fast-import backends have to
	maintain less state.  Using it should speed up exporting.

	This is made optional because ...

I haven't thought through whether it ought to be optional or measured
the effect on import performance.

A separate question is what an svn fast-import backend should do with
all those blobs that are not ready to be written to dump.  As a hack
while prototyping, one can rely on the "current" fast-export output,
even though that is not flexible or futureproof.  Longer term, the
folllowing sounds very interesting

Just thinking aloud, but is it possible to write a filter that converts an
arbitrary G-F-I stream with referenced blobs into a G-F-I stream without
referenced blobs by inlining all the blobs?

to avoid complexity in the svn fast-import backend itself.
(Complicating detail: such a filter would presumably take responsibility
for --export-marks, so it might want a way to retrieve commit marks
from its downstream.)