Dana How (Cc-ed) worked on better support in Git for very large and
not well compressed files (and usually with short history).  Her
solution was to add support to git to limit size of blobs which
entered packs (files/blobs of size larger than given limit were
left as loose objects), and share those loose objects using network
filesystem.  You can search git mailing list to find exact details
of this. IIRC mentioned patches were not accepted; instead there was
proposed a solution where problematic blobs of very large files were
packed into separate kept pack, and this kept pack (or packs, each
containing single blob) were shared using some network filesystem
(network drive).


In addition to that in Documentation/RelNotes-1.5.3 we have:

  - "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in
    .gitattributes.  It does not attempt to deltify blobs that
    come from paths with delta attribute set to false.

(but as far as I can see this attribute is otherwise undocumented).
This can also help performance for a repository with very large files.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
--

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