Re: Subversion Vision and Roadmap Proposal

Hey -

+1!

I'm a game developer. I don't claim to have more insight that you guys do, but reading about the Subversion vision on LWN prompted me to post to the comment, but really I should echo that here. There is a case for centralized RCS, and I think it becomes stronger as repositories scale up. A lot. I've included my text here, and a link to the post.

Thanks,

Jools

http://lwn.net/Articles/382780/

re: Support large repositories!

Yes! Rightly or wrongly game developers have large repositories, with lots of binary files in them. For instance here's the sizes of repository I'm working with.

* Accurev: 22GB workspace in 130,000 files on disk, history going back to 2003,
* Perforce: 115GB workspace in 50,000 files on disk, a couple of years of history

Both of these systems are well able to cope with this. For Subversion, as a centralised VCS, this is the competition.
For what it's worth these are the advantages which being centralised can bring IMO:

* nothing but the files locally. at those sizes you don't want to have to have the whole repository locally (optionally would be fine!), or the pristine copy that subversion currently keeps.
* central backup
* central access to all commited code on all branches

Being centralised shouldn't stop the painless branching and merging that DVCS has. I've used Accurev a lot, and IMO it's competitive with Mercurial for this, although the command line is clunkier. (Use the GUI!)

OTOH a DVCS could bring all of the features above. As far as I know right now nothing does :( I'd love to be proved wrong on this!

Those sizes of repository also suggest why some systems e.g. Perforce use the checkout-before-edit system: it greatly reduces the file scanning required, and so speeds up some client operations greatly.
Received on 2010-04-08 22:31:04 CEST