Comment by CodesInChaos
13 hours ago
I'm a bit surprised Github or some other big git hoster didn't push for such a protocol improvement. Since I assume that smaller and cheaper to create packs would reduce their costs noticeably.
13 hours ago
I'm a bit surprised Github or some other big git hoster didn't push for such a protocol improvement. Since I assume that smaller and cheaper to create packs would reduce their costs noticeably.
Packed objects are compressed individually. I expect the costs and benefits of compression are generally dwarfed by delta-ification.
my local experiments showed any tricky scheme I could come up beaten by plain large window zstd. both on speed and resulting size (memory needed for the window is another matter completely). zstd also was beating the git xdelta+deflate.
The most "free lunch" actually is compressing fast export (or similar format) — if the goal is packing repo as small as possible, then all the SHA in commits and tree objects are derivative incompressible data, and plain references like in fast export can even halve archive size