Okay, I know the obvious answer is the history of the files. But how can I, from the command line, really understand what is hiding inside that .git directory?

Today I was doing one of my periodic disk space audits, trying to figure out where my usage goes. This comes from having a 64GB drive mounted as /home on my Linux laptop. I found some 15G of old video files to delete today, so I'm no longer as pressed for space. But my interest was piqued by one thing I have downloaded from Github that is ~120 megs for a very simple program. Poking around further I find that most of that usage is a single file:

$ ls -lh withExEditorHost/.git/objects/pack/pack-df07816cd15fb091439112029c28ebc366501652.pack
-r--r--r-- 1 elijah elijah 102M Mar 14 23:28 withExEditorHost/.git/objects/pack/pack-df07816cd15fb091439112029c28ebc366501652.pack
$ file withExEditorHost/.git/objects/pack/pack-df07816cd15fb091439112029c28ebc366501652.pack
withExEditorHost/.git/objects/pack/pack-df07816cd15fb091439112029c28ebc366501652.pack: Git pack, version 2, 299 objects
$

Is there a unzip or tar xzf equivalent for Git pack files? Naive usage of git unpack-file is only generating errors for me.

I have an idea, it's not particularly new. I think git code sharing could integrate very nicely with blockchains.

I think it could be done elegantly without modifying the git protocol at all, just as an optional superset (like Github) to provide forks, PR and discussion.

Something like:

• smart contract based system
• something like lightening network for off master chain pushes
• local node hosting all obtained versions of code, something like PNPM meets zeronet
• cloning/pushing over DHT with web torrent.
• client key pairs for collaboration and authentication

Do you guys think it could be done? Thoughts? Ideas? Criticisms?

Would anyone be interested in working on something like this? I'd like all the help I can get and any input people have.