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Re: Space wasting

From: Jan Hendrik <jan.hendrik_at_bigfoot.com>
Date: 2004-03-16 16:48:00 CET

Concerning Re: Space wasting
Bruce Elrick wrote on 15 Mar 2004, 9:12, at least in part:

> The problem is subversion doesn't have control over when a file is
> modified and therefore can't enforce the copy-on-write. Any user with
> any application (text editor, build tool, IDE, script) is going to
> come along and simply modify the files because they exist in a normal
> filesystem. At that point, it is too late to copy the original to
> create the text-base.

Understand.

> I think svk deals with this by creating a local svn *repository* and
> then creating a bare WC that doesn't need a text base. Because the
> repos is local, it can throw out the normal svn policy of reducing
> server/client communications and request a full copy from the local
> repos when doing diffs/deltas between repos versions and wc versions.
>
> But then you have a local repos, which takes space.

And thus would be curing one evil with an even worse evil. Even
one that could limit the user base if one thinks of Berkeley not
running on W9x machines. Not that I personally see the .svn area
and its doubling of space needs as a problem, it was just one of
those little ideas coming between dusk and dawn while paging
through that lengthy discussion. OK, admittedly I have one little
annoyance with the .svn area, too: the filemanager I use (Total
Commander) ignores the "Don't show hidden or system files" when
it comes to synchronizing, so I always have to add a special filter
("| .svn").

> The only other way to deal with this would be to enforce controlled
> access to the wc. Since all tools (IDE, text editors, etc.) are used
> to dealing with a regular filesystem, you'd have to build a virtual
> filesystem wc that did copy-on-write. But that's a whole different
> project.

Indeed. And risk that not all tools would then co-operate nicely with
it.

Jan Hendrik

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Received on Tue Mar 16 17:07:21 2004

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