Timeline for Why do Git/Mercurial repositories use less space?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 25, 2014 at 9:13 | comment | added | JensG | For those who are interested in real-world numbers: I just compared two working copies from the exact same repo. The SVN working copy is about 2,9 GB, the GIT working copy is around 0,8 GB. | |
| Oct 25, 2014 at 8:25 | history | edited | mliebelt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
typos
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| May 20, 2012 at 19:11 | vote | accept | Alex Florescu | ||
| May 15, 2012 at 7:45 | comment | added | Jan Hudec |
The loose vs. packed objects has nothing to do with text vs. binary. It is amortization of the difficult work of finding the binary diffs. Speed is important feature of git, so during regular operation, git only zips the new data and slaps them in the repository. This is loose objects. Than when you ask it to by calling git gc or too many loose objects accumulate, it finds good candidates to delta-compress them against (git can diff against other than previous version), stores the deltas in a "pack" and removes the loose objects.
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| May 15, 2012 at 7:36 | comment | added | Jan Hudec | Git treats text and binary files exactly the same way in all and any regards with respect to storage. The loose vs. packed objects is unrelated to text vs. binary. The reason binary files often result in much larger diffs than text files is that many binary formats (including all the new office formats) are already compressed and thus even a small change in content often causes big change in the resulting binary blob. This is equally of concern to git and subversion, but subversion only takes the penalty on server, while git everywhere. | |
| May 15, 2012 at 6:14 | history | edited | mliebelt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Added reference to inner working of Git (and thank's to Matthew for his detailed explanation)
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| May 14, 2012 at 12:21 | comment | added | mliebelt | Asked someone (by email) which knows much more than me, and will include his answer in my answer then. | |
| May 14, 2012 at 11:46 | comment | added | jk. | are you sure that git stores complete copies of office files? I think it also stores binary diffs. of course the really issue with these sort of files is they are often already compressed so a small change can cause the whole file to change | |
| May 14, 2012 at 6:22 | history | answered | mliebelt | CC BY-SA 3.0 |