On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, David Lang wrote: > > the offset within a pack for the starting location of an object cannot be > larger then 4G. Well, strictly speaking, even that isn't actually a limit on the _pack_ format itself. It's really just the (totally separate) index that currently uses 32-bit offsets. For example, you can actually use the pack-file to transfer more than 4GB of data over the network. You'd not need to change the format at all. Only the local _index_ of the result needs to change - but we never transfer that at all (it's always generated locally), so that's really a separate issue. It's not even hard to fix. It's just that right now, the biggest repository that we know about (mozilla) is not even close to the limit. And it took them ten years to get there. So if the mozilla people switch to git, and keep going at the same rate, we have about 70 years left before we need to fix the indexing ;) (Of course, other projects, like the kernel, seem to grow faster, so it might be "only" a decade or two - but since the index format is a local thing, even that won't be too painful, since we don't really need a global flag-day once we decide to start supporting larger offsets in the index) Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html