Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Arch Versus CVS Versus Subversoin

[Andrew Suffield]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:09:30PM -0600, John A Meinel wrote:
> >Yes, arch supports binary diffs in exactly the same sense as subversion.
> >
> >It doesn't do delta compression on them. That's irrelevant.
> 
> It is not irrelevant, people care about it.

People care about the price of oil as well, but that's still irrelevant.

> Yes, I understand why it does that. And I'm not really advocating that 
> it changes. I might argue that we would be better off storing the md5sum 
> of the previous version rather than a complete copy of it, but generally 
> that is irrelevant.

That would be broken. Arch changesets are reversible.

> Admittedly, I'm talking about a small population (about 10+ people), but 
> when I was taught CVS I was warned that binary files are not "diffed" 
> but store in complete form each time. (Obviously this should have been 
> "delta compressed"). I have also heard this argument from independent 
> sources (as mentioned, about 10 times). I realize all of us are using 
> the wrong terminology here. But I know that is what they meant, because 
> the complaint was about the size of the archive, and how much better SVN 
> is because it only stores the changes.

The difference in space consumed is not all that large for typical
applications. It's not a big deal. As always, nobody cares about it
enough to bother to implement it. Including you.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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