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Vault: Add a "git bare" tarball cooker
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Description

We currently use the git fast-import format to allow people to retrieve revisions from the archive using the vault. However, this is wildly inefficient and generally a bad idea for several reasons:

  • It's a poorly documented format (man git-fast-import), non-trivial to understand, and generally niche, which makes development hard
  • It's lossy. It doesn't always handle signed tags properly as well as tagged trees (see man git-fast-export -> /LIMITATIONS). No guarantee of retrieving the same hash in output.
  • The output is extremely large. The format was designed to be trivial to use as an in-memory piped interchange between a VCS and a git fast-import process, no considerations were given to space utilization. All the objects are deduplicated with no delta encoding.
  • Exporting it from the archive is expensive. Only modified files are exported at each commit, so finding out which files where modified requires diffing *all* the commit trees with their parents, which is stupidly expensive and virtually impossible to parallelize.

A better option would be to create a "git bare" cooker: a bare Git repository (= with no working directory) where we put all the git objects in .git/objects directly. This is very fast and easily parallelizable on our side, and we can recompress all the objects together before caching the bundle by calling git repack-objects.

Once we have this bare repository, we could just create a tarball of it and cache this. Another option would be to investigate the git bundle format, which apparently serves a similar purpose, but could be simpler to import for the users.

Revisions and Commits

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Event Timeline

seirl triaged this task as Wishlist priority.Nov 7 2017, 7:06 PM
seirl created this task.

And what would be the actual on-the-wire serialization format used to send the bare repo to users? Some sort of archive of the .git dir or what?

Maybe git-bundle(1) is an even better idea. I'm not sure if the format is documented somewhere though.

seirl removed seirl as the assignee of this task.Mar 22 2019, 1:29 PM
seirl raised the priority of this task from Wishlist to Normal.Apr 27 2021, 10:56 PM

done, and released as swh-vault v1.0.0 :)

Not yet publicly available, this is tracked by this task's parent task