On 3/15/06, Leon Zandman <lzandman@lode.nl> wrote:
>
> > Why is SVN less suitable for binary files? I revision
> > them all the time.
>
> Ofcourse it is no problem to add binary files to SVN; I do it myself all
> the time. But I was talking about VERY LARGE binary files.
>
> I know of two reasons why it MIGHT be a problem:
>
> 1) The delta engine in SVN works better for plain text files than for
> binary files. I think this is because binary files tend to differ more
> between two revisions than text files.
Good point but there's really 2 different issues here. 1 - SVN is not
excellent at understanding that I inserting 25k of new binary data at the
beginning of a 600MB file so it only needs a 25k delta. There was a recent
discussion on the svn dev list about the "window size" used to find these
deltas. 2 - Some binary files (jpg, I think) use built-in compression with a
time-based component which means that every byte could change each time it's
saved, even if no actual changes were made to the file itself. I don't see
how SVN can address this issue.
2) SVN keeps a base copy of every file in your working copy in the
> ".svn" directory, so if you checkout a very large file it will exist at
> least twice on your hard disk. I can imagine this can be problematic.
Yeah, this is another valid point.
Another topic that often comes up is to store only the most recent revision
so SVN can be used as a distribution system instead of having to configure
two different file sources and merge them.
Received on Wed Mar 15 16:54:10 2006