[tjdetwiler]

Rust's cargo does something similar, however it looks like they were much more conscious of git-scalability (ex: limiting the directories in a single level, only appending lines to files to make diffs small).

https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index

[wycats]

For what it's worse, both of these characteristics indeed weren't an accident.

At the time, I wrote a script that hammered git commits into a repository using different strategies and looked at what the git repository would look like after 100,000 and a million commits. The "one version per file, nested in a flat structure" had serious issues.

There may still be scaling limits with the Cargo approach, but if we reach them, we have plans to create a new registry with a new initial commit and let the old registry age out, then rinse/repeat. At the moment, we haven't hit limits yet (with about 1/3 of the packages that Cocoapods has).