zit now imports sqlite at defaults: 36,416 commits, 2,109 refs, 44m35s, no flags. Two independent walls stood in front of that.

Refs (issue 21). One file per ref made a ref's name a path, so the filesystem got a vote on which repositories are representable. sqlite has refs/remotes/origin/EQP-improvements and .../eqp-improvements at different commits -- legal, distinct git refs -- and on APFS the second landed on the first as a bare PathAlreadyExists, raised during publication after the whole import had run. Case was only the reachable instance; path length, reserved device names and each platform's own Unicode fold table are the same bug in other clothes.

They are one sorted file now, "refs", whose lines pair a canonical name with its target. Nothing reads it back -- "refs" is a reserved root the working-tree scan skips, and branches resolve through repostate's sym- tags -- so it is interop output and its job is to be legible. Sorting makes it byte-identical for a given ref set, so two imports of one repository can be compared.

This supersedes the ASCII-fold refusal from the previous commit. That was the right interim while a ref was a filename; with one file the collision is representable, so refusing it would be gratuitous. What survives is the genuine collision -- distinct sources normalizing to a byte-identical canonical name, refs/heads/./release against refs/heads/release -- which no layout can hold, and which now names both sources instead of only failing.

Budget (issue 20). The 4 GiB payload default refused sqlite's 12.2 GiB stream, and could not simply be raised: fileCommandCeiling divided the same number, so a larger allowance for a whole history was also a larger allowance for one commit's retained command list. Those bound different things and only one is memory -- payload streams and is released per event (sqlite's import held 21 MiB), while a commit's command list is held whole. The arena has max_command_arena_bytes of its own now and keeps the old 4 GiB; the cumulative total goes to 1 TiB.

The file-command ceiling is therefore structural: about 104 million commands in one commit, and no flag raises it. Its diagnostic says so rather than pointing at a knob that no longer moves it. The help text claimed the payload flag fixed both; it only ever fixed one. check-in: 8ae7041c2c user: dmestas tags: sub-manifest