svn vs. hg vs. git for home directories

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

John D. Mitchell wrote:

> I'm a bit confused as to why hg shows so poorly w.r.t. the small files
> in the sizing comparison.

A git pack acts similarly to concatenating all of the files and
compressing them in one go.  Since it has more entropy to work with, it
can do a better job of compressing everything.  Mercurial deals with
files individually, so it can't gain that same benefit.

A best-of-both-worlds approach would be to use a pack file for the
initial clone of a repository, with revlogs for subsequent changes.
That would get rid of git's silly repacking (which remains silly even if
git does it automatically for you, as it does now), but still give
excellent compression ratios in general, as most repositories contain
few changes relative to their upstream counterparts.

	<b