Shawn Pearce explains:
Some repositories contain a lot of references (e.g. android at 866k,
rails at 31k). The reftable format provides:
- Near constant time lookup for any single reference, even when the
repository is cold and not in process or kernel cache.
- Near constant time verification if a SHA-1 is referred to by at least
one reference (for allow-tip-sha1-in-want).
- Efficient lookup of an entire namespace, such as `refs/tags/`.
- Support atomic push `O(size_of_update)` operations.
- Combine reflog storage with ref storage.
This file format spec was originally written in July, 2017 by Shawn
Pearce. Some refinements since then were made by Shawn and by Han-Wen
Nienhuys based on experiences implementing and experimenting with the
format. (All of this was in the context of our work at Google and
Google is happy to contribute the result to the Git project.)
Imported from JGit[1]'s current version (c217d33ff,
"Documentation/technical/reftable: improve repo layout", 2020-02-04)
of Documentation/technical/reftable.md and converted to asciidoc by
running
pandoc -t asciidoc -f markdown reftable.md >reftable.txt
using pandoc 2.2.1. The result required the following additional
minor changes:
- removed the [TOC] directive to add a table of contents, since
asciidoc does not support it
- replaced git-scm.com/docs links with linkgit: directives that link
to other pages within Git's documentation
[1] https://eclipse.googlesource.com/jgit/jgit
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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