[RFC] Blob format

[Matthieu Moy]

Johan Rydberg <jrydberg at gnu.org> writes:

> The golden goal of the blob format is to eliminate a lot of RTT's to a
> dumb remote server, and try to get rid of the problem with identifying
> what to fetch.

But won't this make local operation much slower ?

Is this "blob" supposed to come in addition to the, say, knit format,
or as a new format replacing it if it's adoted ?

Indeed, this reminds me the GNU Arch format, which was one of the
bottlenecks for performance (but was extremely bandwidth-saving for
remote operations).

> My current work is focusing on having a model where a blob can contain
> several revisions.  Blobs are immutable, but can be combined into a
> new blob.  This is done while doing a push/pull/merge.  Meaning the
> number of blobs will be reduces when data is shared between repos.

This sounds indeed very similar to what bundles do. Plus, perhaps,
some indexing, and for sure some compression.

-- 
Matthieu