I played with making a git alternative that was streamlined according to workflow. I haven't completely abandoned it, but my core idea was that you can use ast path to compress the data further.

Like you said git is really efficient, and even though I went in with some criticism because of the work(mess) that is chromium and the deep hacking I did there to fix stuff between versions without forcing a complete rebuild

I came to the conclusion that as a compression alternative, my approach wasn't worth it. Git did a better job!

Anyway here's the attempt: https://github.com/pankon/gat

Does git support better compression algorithms than deflate, like zstd or brotli?

> The du options are: s to summarize and b to display bytes.

Small nitpick: Use long options and your code samples become self explanatory!

It can get even smaller when loose objects get packed into packfiles because of delta compression: a whole bunch of identical files can be stored in minimal overhead over storing one copy.

Did you do —apparent-size?