The core.bigFileThreshold documentation has been largely unchanged
since 5eef828bc0 (fast-import: Stream very large blobs directly to
pack, 2010-02-01).
But since then this setting has been expanded to affect a lot more
than that description indicated. Most notably in how "git diff" treats
them, see 6bf3b81348 (diff --stat: mark any file larger than
core.bigfilethreshold binary, 2014-08-16).
In addition to that, numerous commands and APIs make use of a
streaming mode for files above this threshold.
So let's attempt to summarize 12 years of changes in behavior, which
can be seen with:
git log --oneline -Gbig_file_thre 5eef828bc03.. -- '*.c'
To do that turn this into a bullet-point list. The summary Han Xin
produced in [1] helped a lot, but is a bit too detailed for
documentation aimed at users. Let's instead summarize how
user-observable behavior differs, and generally describe how we tend
to stream these files in various commands.
1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/20220120112114.47618-5-chiyutianyi@gmail.com/
Helped-by: Han Xin <chiyutianyi@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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