Should 'svnadmin dump --deltas' write svndiff1 diffs? (was Re: svn commit: r18363)

(I've broken this into a separate thread so that it's more visible.
I don't think most people are interested in the minutiae of the svndiff
code :-))

Background: the change to add support for zlib-compressed svndiff streams
(svndiff1) also makes 'svnadmin dump --deltas' write svndiff1 deltas,
even if the source repository is an 'svndiff0' repository.

On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 01:43:12PM -0500, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> > This means that 'svnadmin dump --deltas' dumps won't be loadable by
> > 1.3.x clients. Do we really want to do that?
> I'm not sure.
>
> Do people often dump and then load back into older versions?
>

Well, 'svnadmin dump' is our guaranteed portable backup format, though I
don't know if the same applies to 'svnadmin dump --deltas'. (In fact,
I'm not really sure I know what the use case for that option is - just
saving space?).

> If so, we probably should add a --no-svndiff1 option to dump as well.
>

No, I think that's the wrong way round - we don't want people using
revision-based 'dump --deltas' for backup purposes to suddenly find that
they're using a format that can only be read by svnadmin 1.4.x.

Better would be either to always write svndiff0 (people can pipe it
through gzip if they want, and may already be doing so), or perhaps to
provide a '--svndiff1' option to write svndiff1 deltas. We could even
look at inferring a default from the filesystem version, though I think
we might need both --svndiff1 and --svndiff0 options to override it in
that case.

Regards,
Malcolm

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Received on Wed Feb 8 14:21:23 2006