[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Questions from a Subversion user

[John Goerzen]

Thanks for the helpful reply.  A couple of responses are included below:

Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:

> No, and my impression of the consensus is that this is a feature (that
> it does _not_ do this), as it simplifies merge semantics.  At the same

Good enough.  I'm OK with a paradigm shift :-)

> In arch we say "archive" not repository.  And my first impression is to
> say that the size of the archive is essentially irrelevant.  It is
> "suitable" for any size archive.

Excellent.  Subversion starts to have some problems when you exceed
.5GB.

> arch supports a bunch of transports: ftp, sftp, http, and others.  arch
> implements its own locking scheme.  I am not sure what you mean by
> "insure integrity."

What I'm talking about is multiple users writing to the repository at
once.  FTP (and SFTP, and HTTP) doesn't implement anything like
flock() -- and the best that one normally can do is creating
lockfiles, which have inherent race conditions and are thus
unreliable.  It'd be really easy to have two people running a STOR on
the same file at once -- with likely disastrous results.

(I believe WebDAV does not have this problem.)

>> 4. A lot of documentation talks about people making new repositories
>>    each year because old ones get "big".  Why do people need to make
>>    new repositories annually?
>
> Big in the sense of lots of categories and branches, many which may be
> "dead."

OK, that makes a lot more sense.  I misunderstood the motivation for
this.

-- John