John, I'm well aware as to what svk does (I'm an svk comitter). What I'm
suggesting is a scalabe cache rather than a complete mirror. It's just that
on one end of the spectrum you have the current text-base cache (or even
less, and only a cache of the files you are operating on right now) while at
the other end of the spectrum you have a full mirror like svk.
The main difference would be that since this is a cache, if I'm no longer
interested in keeping certain older revisions of files around I can tell the
cache to toss them (possibly automaticaly by limited the amount of diskspace
the cache is allowed to use). Also if I only check out a subset of a large
svn repo and later checkout more the cache would get populated with whatever
is needed on demand.
Think of this cache as a subversion repository with obliterate-like
functionality. Obviously this idea would need to be fleshed out more, but I
do believe this could be implemented in a way that unifies the benefits of
both svn and svk, and even let's users check out working copies of large
projects without the need for a second local copy of the entire tree at all.
Michael
On 10/16/06, John Peacock <jpeacock@rowman.com> wrote:
>
> Michael Brouwer wrote:
> > Another option would be to locally store a text-base cache of some sort
> > outside the actual working copies. This cache could be shared between
> > multiple working copies of the same project tree. The text base cache
> itself
> > could potentially use some kind of delta storage model to provide
> multiple
> > cached revisions of files. That way not just svn diff and svn status
> could
> > be local, but potentially diffing between trunk and a branch that are
> both in
> > cache could be. The cache can be as sparse or as filled as a user
> likes,
> > with the ultimate cache being a mirror of the entire repository, making
> every
> > operation disconnected.
>
> Congratulations! You've just reinvented SVK:
>
> http://svk.elixus.org/
>
> Let's see:
>
> 1) stores the "text base" using a delta storage model - check (SVK has a
> repository using delta storage to compare against);
>
> 2) shares the "text base" with multiple working copies - you can check out
> multiple working copies from the same SVK repository;
>
> 3) sparse cache - check (SVK can mirror a remote repository in whole or
> from any
> arbitrary revision).
>
> ;-)
>
> John
>
>
> --
> John Peacock
> Director of Information Research and Technology
> Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
> 4501 Forbes Blvd
> Suite H
> Lanham, MD 20706
> 301-459-3366 x.5010
> fax 301-429-5747
>
Received on Tue Oct 17 00:30:47 2006