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You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles

148 points · 35 comments · evacchi

  1. mgrandl · · focus · HN ↗
    Sweet. It’s kinda wild to me that this hasn’t been done. Would be so much nicer if gitlab/forgejo/gitea/… supported object storage for everything. Currently you always still need a filesystem for git repos.
    1. throwaway7356 · · focus · HN ↗
      It has been done. It is no longer done because it is not efficient.

      Yes, it was not "object storage", but Git can be served from a dumb http server as static files. Now someone figured out that object storage can also serve static files via http. Wow!

    2. eru · · focus · HN ↗
      On Linux, Fuse is your friend. See eg <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matthiasgoergens&#x2F;git-snap-fs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matthiasgoergens&#x2F;git-snap-fs
    3. baalimago · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; It’s kinda wild to me that this hasn’t been done

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awslabs&#x2F;git-remote-s3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awslabs&#x2F;git-remote-s3

      This works seamlessly so you can run `git remote add origin s3:&#x2F;&#x2F;my-git-bucket&#x2F;my-repo`

    4. everforward · · focus · HN ↗
      Doesn’t Git store data in sparse files? My impression is that git’s on-disk layout is exactly the kind of thing you’d avoid on object storage. Interactions involve a ton of small reads, resulting in poor performance and enormous bills.

      It only really makes sense to tarball repos into cold storage on S3 or Glacier, but short of GitLab cloud I suspect there aren’t enough repos cold enough to be worth the dev costs.

      S3 that doesn’t have wild costs for git objects sounds like it’s just NFS

      1. masklinn · · focus · HN ↗
        Git does not use sparse files no, however in packs objects are delta-ified: any object can be either literal or a combination of literal segments and range copies from a base object, and that base object can be the same, recursively. So to resolve any object you need to jump around a fair bit in the pack file. The normal GC creates delta chain of length 10, aggressive defaults to 50, the maximum is 4095.
    5. shados · · focus · HN ↗
      There&#x27;s a bunch. I got pissed during one of the last GitHub outages and had an AI agent one shot a clone with PR, stacks, actions, and full compatibility with the git client running on Cloudflare workers and R2. Only limitations is it was https only because CF workers don&#x27;t have tcp to implement and without an enterprise account.

      Works great to this day. And I was far from the first.

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