Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: >> Yes, the bulk-checkin mechanism suffers from an even worse problem which >> is the pack it creates will contain no deltas whatsoever. The contents >> of the pack are just getting written as-is, so there's no fancy >> delta-ficiation going on. > > I wonder how big a deal this would be in practice for merges. > ... Thanks for your experiments ;-) The reason why bulk-checkin mechanism does not attempt deltifying (as opposed to fast-import that attempts to deltify with the immediately previous object and only with that single object) is exactly the same. It was done to support the initial check-in, which by definition lacks the delta opportunity along the time axis. As you describe, such a delta-less pack would risk missed deltification opportunity when running a repack (without "-f"), as the opposite of the well known "reuse delta" heuristics, aka "this object was stored in the base form, it is likely that the previous pack-object tried but did not find a good delta base for it, let's not waste time retrying that" heuristics would get in the way.
