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binaries in WC

From: Bolstridge, Andrew <andy.bolstridge_at_intergraph.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 11:19:30 +0100

Hi.
        I was thinking about how binaries are stored in the WC.
Currently, checkout any WC and you get a copy of the files in the
metadata directories, which is fine for things like source files and
other text files, but when people come to store binaries in their
repositories, this starts to be a nuisance.

        Storing binaries, I hope, isn't controversial. I do it for
shipped releases, but also store word documents, images and similar.

        Thinking about why a copy of each file is stored locally, it
makes perfect sense for text, as you can perform certain operations
really quickly - diff for example. However, I'm not sure these
operations can be reasonably applied to binary files?

        So, would it be a good optimisation to store just the hash of a
binary in the WC instead of the full contents? It could cut down the
size of the WC considerably which is often cited as a problem with SVN,
and might improve checkout times. I don't think it would have any impact
on the operation of the WC either. Revert is the only operation I can
think of that would be an issue, but in this case the original would be
retrieved from the repo.

Would this be something to consider for wc-ng?

Thanks, Andy

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Received on 2009-08-04 12:23:18 CEST

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