Generating vdeltas

It is my understanding that in subversion the vdelta is generated on
the client side, somewhere in libsvn_delta, and the server simply
stores whatever the client gives it. Is that true, or does the server
apply the vdelta and have both revs to look at and potentially
recalculate the vdelta?

One thousand years ago, when mainframes walked the earth, Walter Tichy
made a big deal about how clever RCS was to store the most frequently
requested version and calculate other versions relative to that one.
Is subversion doing that? If so, it must have to calculate inverse
deltas.

The reason this comes up is that we're talking about cvs2svn
outputting XML that includes a vdelta. I'm wondering if I can get
lazy and just write a vdelta that says, "replace the whole file with
this whole new file", without bloating the database.

Thanks.

-- 
                                        K<bob>
kbob_at_jogger-egg.com, http://www.jogger-egg.com/