> "GIT only copies files when the checksums differ". Are you sure? > Are checksums that reliable? Can you give me a reference? But I > agree that GIT uses significantly less space than SVN (and Mercurial > uses even less).
GIT computes the MD5SUM of each file and each subdirectory and of the whole tree. Only subtrees or files which have different MD5SUMs are every stored, copied or transmitted. Thus creating a copy and checking it in does almost nothing and takes almost no time to upload. I know this works because I have switched to GIT for all of my personal work. Multiple copies of gcl-2.6.8pre.tgz take no additional space or time to transmit. Arch seems to want to trade disk space for file transfer time. If you check out an arch repository it makes a "pristine copy" which it caches locally, thus taking twice the disk space. The advantage is that you don't do any network traffic for some operations because you have a local, unchanged copy. The disadvantage is the huge disk space cost. GIT does not store a local copy but only has to transmit the MD5SUM of the tree root or subdirectory to decide if changes occur. I'm not sure what SVN does. You can see it in the numbers I just sent. Arch takes 305M, GIT takes 135M for the same copy of Axiom. t _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
