Strange effect with tar file of a cloned repository in GIT

Question

I've been trying to put my filesystem for a very small busybox-based distro into a git-repository. And with success. The only strange thing I can not get my head around is the following :

When making a compressed tarball from the files from the repository (after clone/checkout) I get a very much larger tar.gz-file. Size goes up from 16M to 21M (!?)

Answer 1

My guess is that the cloned repository isn't compressed in exactly the same way as the original repository.

The first step would be to find out the amount of disk space occupied by the original and the cloned repositories (using "du -s") rather than depending on the size of the .tar files.

If you want the repository to be small, look into "git gc --aggressive".

Answer 2

Here some things to check:
Produce tar files rather than tar.gz files and see if the size difference is still present. The ordering of files in a tar file might affect how efficient the compression is.

Get a directory listing of both tar files (-tv) and see if they contain exactly the same files, and with exactly the same lengths. Do a tree file comparison between the files that go into the original tar and the ones that go into the new tar.