David Weintraub wrote:
>
> Now, I have a 2.1 dual gigabyte processor sitting on my desktop with
> 120 Gigabytes of space. Nothing too exceptional these days. The big
> problem is the slow network. Back when Atria was ClearCase's company,
> the only traffic on my network was email. Now, gigabytes of data
> passes back and forth every minute.
>
> Even ClearCase's "winkin" feature is useless. My system can build any
> object way before ClearCase can locate it in its database and transfer
> it to my view.
>
> Subversion was designed with this modern architecture in mind.
I'm not sure I'd agree that a slow or overloaded network is a modern
architecture.
> We have
> access to massive amounts of diskspace and fast processors while our
> servers can be bogged down with traffic. Why not put all of that disk
> space to good use and reduce the amount of traffic on the network?
If your diskspace is all disposable stuff, that might be reasonable. If
you have anything that needs to be backed up, you've just doubled the
amount that had to be there or created a labor-intensive job to identify
that parts that do/don't need backup. And you want to add this load to
a network that you don't consider adequate in the first place?
> Heck, many users use their laptops and they don't always have network
> access. Subversion is structured to allow these users to do their
> diffs and reverts and check to see what has been changed without
> worrying about your network connection.
Why is it any more likely that you'd diff against the checked out
version than an older one or a branch?
> However, environments keep changing, and Subversion's design may soon
> become as archaic as ClearCase's original design. Look at Netbooks
> with minimal diskspace. Look at the ubiquitous network. Every donut
> place and coffee shop has free WiFi connectivity. With 3G and 4G
> networks, you have access to your repository from almost anywhere.
Or, consider places other than typical development environments where
version controlled files would be useful and the pristine copies are
just in the way.
> Maybe the next great revision control system will rely on this
> universal network access and less on local diskspace. Maybe the next
> repository storage medium will be "cloud based". However, for right
> now, I believe the designers of Subversion have hit a good compromise
> between disk space usage and network usage.
It is reasonable for some subset of usage. It would just be nice to
have the option to have the server side take care of the overhead. I
suppose if the ability to hold the metadata elsewhere is grafted in, it
would at least be possible to mount that space from the server (or some
other server) but it still seems like a waste to require a duplicate
copy for every instance.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell_at_gmail.com
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Received on 2009-04-28 18:21:10 CEST