svn vs. hg vs. git for home directories

John D. Mitchell jdmitchell at gmail.com
Fri Apr 25 16:09:45 UTC 2008


On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 8:54 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
[...]
>  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.

Got it.  Thanks.

>  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.

And people get the repack just by cloning.  Sweet.

And, it wouldn't change the guarantees of the append-only data store.

Do you have some gut feeling for it's affect on cloning speed?

Rock on,
John



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