Re: fs dump/restore proposal

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 04:43:08PM -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

Just one minor observation:

> * should we bother to implement 'diffy' storage of texts in our
> format? My instinct is "no". Dumping and restoring a filesystem
> is a rare operation, so we don't need to be so paranoid about disk
> space usage. It would be extra work to implement diffy-storage,
> and imports would probably be safer (and faster) if we had nothing
> but fulltexts in our dump.

A file with a great deal of history is likely to expand enormously
when converted to fulltexts. For instance, I have a copy of
cpplib.c,v from the GCC tree from February lying around. It's 1.2MB.
Extracting all the revisions produces 36MB of text. Assuming that
that's a reasonable average scale factor, the entire repository
(200MB) would expand to 6GB of fulltexts.

But you're right that diff-y storage is extra work, and the exact
nature of the diffs is definitely non-fundamental information. I
would suggest you just slap a compressor on the output end of the
dumper.

Incidentally, is this intended to be the appropriate way to back up a
Subversion repository, or should one just freeze the database and
archive the db files, or what?

zw

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Received on Wed Apr 24 00:00:44 2002