Re: Announcing reposurgeon, and requesting fast-import support.

Julian Foad <julian.foad_at_wandisco.com>:
> Very cool. I wonder how practical it will be for doing various
> "obliterate" tasks on large repositories.

The main overhead is, as you might imagine, the parse time for the .fi
file. And, I admit, it can be painfully slow. Loading up the git
repository takes 40 minutes on my PC. I would be more concerned about
this if the operations reposurgeon supports weren't unusual, generally
one-time procedures.

But, as is, the tool works, and I'm trying to follow the "Make it
work, make it right, *then* make it fast" heuristic. Even though one
colleague has argued with a straight face that I *shouldn't* speed-tune
it - he thinks repo surgery is so risky and potentially shady that
it's good for using the tool to require sustained attention and an
effort of will.

> > NAME and VALUE are utf8-encoded. The properties for each commit are sorted
> > by the property name
>
> Ah, so the format doesn't support arbitrary 'binary' property values? I
> guess we can seek a way to work around that.

Indeed. Base-64 encoding is our friend :-).

-- 
		Eric S. Raymond