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Re: CVS and Binaries


From: Paul Sander
Subject: Re: CVS and Binaries
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 13:43:46 -0800

>--- Forwarded mail from address@hidden

>Sau Dan Lee <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> For your  case, I think  you'll be better  of saving the  binary
>> files with names  containing version numbers (manually  assigned). 
>> There is no space lost with this method  (since there is no generic
>> way to diff two binary files to produce  a minimal diff result). 
>> Moreover, one of the most useful  function of CVS is to  diff
>> arbitrary versions.  With binary files, you don't have  this useful
>> feature anyway.

>I'm puzzled by what would be gained by saving two different versions of 
>a binary file as separate entities rather than as a new version.  If you 
>have file.doc version 1.1 and commit an update to 1.2, then the 
>repository file.doc,v file increases in size.  If you add the new file 
>as file-1.doc, you've used approximately the same amount of disk space 
>in the repository, haven't you?  The disk space will be in two ,v files 
>instead of 1.  At least in browsing through binaries in our repository 
>suggests no space savings would result in checking in the files 
>separately as opposed to updating an existing file.

>It's much more convenient, from a management point of view, to use the 
>update mechanism rather than to keep changing file names.  At least for 
>binary files that change relatively infrequently.  I don't think that 
>using CVS would be good for binary files that changed frequently (such 
>as a database).

The other benefit to not changing the file name for each revision is that
"cvs log" produces meaningful output.

>--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden




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