[Monotone-devel] Re: Extensions to automation, again

[Bruce Stephens]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> However, the expensive part of file reconstruction is not applying
> the deltas -- it's loading the deltas from disk and uncompressing
> them.  So probably an algorithm that calculates just the size of the
> final file is not much faster than an algorithm that calculates the
> file contents as a whole, since the expensive part is the same for
> both.

Ah, but if you just want the size, can't you just uncompress the
(single) delta for the version you want and look at that (add up the
sizes of the copies and inserts)?  (Just making full-text copies the
worst case, I suppose.)

Depends on the details of the deltas, of course (I can certainly
imagine sensible forms where this wouldn't work).  I'm thinking of
what I vaguely remember from reading about xdelta, but that doesn't
necessarily correspond to what monotone actually does, which I haven't
checked.

[...]