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Re: SVN for binary asset management

From: David Ripton <dripton_at_ripton.net>
Date: 2005-03-31 06:09:16 CEST

On 2005.03.31 14:39:43 +0000, Simon Anderson wrote:
> I could use some advice on Subversion's suitability for asset management
> in the film industry.
>
> Commercial products such as Alienbrain (http://alienbrain.com/whde.php)
> are available for use as a repository/change control solution. I wonder
> if Subversion could be used as the basis for a F/OSS alternative.
>
> Generally, the data is gigabytes of (primarily) image and movie files
> stored on a SAN. The users are artists (animators, compositors,
> lighters, etc.) editors, visual effects supervisors, producers,
> administrators and the like all who interact with the data in slightly
> different ways. On the back end is a render farm that would also
> interface with the repository.
>
> Does this sound like something that Subversion could be good for?

svn does not yet support locking, and relies on merging of parallel
changes instead. Many people who work on binaries that are hard to
merge really want locking. It's coming in 1.2.

Each svn working copy stores two copies of each versioned file. This is
a good space-for-speed tradeoff when you're versioning small text files
and the repository is far away, but a bad one for huge binaries.

svn doesn't make it easy to delete excess data from the repository to
save space. (You have to do a dump and filter and load, and this
changes revision numbers.) So if you don't have space to remember every
change, the administrator and users are in for some pain.

I suspect these shortcomings will all be fixed someday. But I don't
think the current version of svn is what you want. If it's important to
use a free program, you might want to look at cvs.

-- 
David Ripton    dripton@ripton.net
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Received on Thu Mar 31 06:12:35 2005

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