Proposal for new frozen repositories server

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 6 Feb 2011, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
>> git has a tendency to hang during switches between branches
>
> git + many large compressed binary files == lots of unhappiness,
> pointless abuse of IO.
>
> You don't save any interesting disk space re metadata (fs metadata vs
> git metadata likely cancel out). And git's internal assumptions about
> what you're trying to do... yeah, LOTs of unhappiness.
>
> You have my vote on ditching it. And I cannot think of anything better
> than a good old filesystem for the task at hand.

there was a discussion on the git mailing list a week or so ago about how 
to handle large files, and it appears that you can do a lot with the 
clean/smudge filters that can make it store this sort of file in the 
filesystem, but in a way that is transparent to users.

now, when you do a checkout (including when you switch branches), you do 
need to make that checkout contain the correct files for that version. 
that will include copying the large binary versions for that version.

David Lang