Re: Subversion in Embedded Devices

On Feb 25, 2005, at 1:14 PM, Davis Ford wrote:
>
> I'm not sure I understand why this replica exists.

Because svn was deliberately designed with the assumption that disk is
cheap and plentiful, and network bandwidth is not. Yes, it uses up 2x
disk space, but it means that 'svn revert' and 'svn diff' don't touch
the network at all. It also allows 'svn commit' to send small diffs to
the server, rather than whole files.

Years later, we've heard countless requests to make this feature into a
configurable option... let the users decide whether to optimize for
disk or network.

Unfortunately, this design-choice is so deeply embedded into the svn
code, that it would take nearly a complete rewrite (of libsvn_wc.so) to
make it happen. It's one of those long-range things we hope to do for
svn 2.0 or later. There are no concrete short-term plans to do it.
(Trust me, it's hard. It's not the kind of thing you can just tweak
over a weekend. People have tried and failed many times already.)

That said, this design choice might make SVN a bad choice for embedded
systems. :-/

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Received on Fri Feb 25 20:31:34 2005