[Adium-devl] Version Control - To change or not to change? THAT is the question!

[David Symonds]

On Jan 2, 2008 6:29 PM, Augie Fackler <lists at durin42.com> wrote:
> > The Mozilla project did a sample conversion of their 10 year, 240,000
> > commit repository: a single checkout was 350 MB, CVS stored the
> > history in 3 GB, SVN in 12 GB, and Git in 300 MB. Yes, megabytes. The
> > entire history was stored in less space than a single full version of
> > the source tree.
>
> This brings up a point I've never seen directly asked (maybe I just
> chill with the wrong VCS crowd):
> Doesn't using this kind of insane compression make accessing the
> history insanely slow?

No, it makes it faster, since disk I/O is the bottleneck in these
situations. It also strongly depends on the particular accessing
operation you are using. For Git at least, everything is fundamentally
SHA-1-hash based, so many operations result in simple file system
lookups.

> > My summation: "It *is* broke, you just don't realise it."
>
> I don't think assuming it's broken is safe - honestly, merging
> *works*, just not as cleanly as we'd like. That said, DVCS does offer
> some (reasonably, IMO) compelling features that are nice-to-haves, not
> "missing features" that imply brokenness in Subversion.

Yes, I think I misspoke, sorry. I should have said "It isn't broke,
but it could be a whole lot better." Once you're immersed in using a
DVCS, though, going back to SVN feels like rebooting from OS X back to
Windows 3.1.


Dave.