[kwlug-disc] rcs (git?) integration/prevalence? [Was: CSS: varying colours based on inheritance]

John Johnson jvj at golden.net
Fri Jul 8 13:46:20 EDT 2011


On 2011-07-08 11:54, unsolicited wrote:
> Isn't one of the long time pros of rcs, though, the minimal storage 
> keeping revisions take?

IMHO: No!. See below.

> It almost feels like a filter to be passed through before being handed 
> to the filesystem, save a file, the filter compresses / diffs / 
> whatever is appropriate for that rcs, then passes the result on to the 
> file system.

My apologies for mentioning the non-*ix elephant in the room but (IIRC) 
MS Visual Source Safe does the above.
And to the point where I have heard of horror stories where the 
compressed image of a base plus diffs gets corrupted. And all is lost.

The concept of a "base plus diffs" also appears in the area backups, 
i.e. full backup vs. incremental backups.

My IIRC above comes from a 10 year old recall of the last time I was 
involved with VSS.

My point is that minimizing storage space should not be a primary goal 
of an rcs.

It could be argued that having no rcs at all and only keeping the last 
image of the code, files, images, etc. would meet the goal of minimizing 
storage space.

Thanks all for the (for me: timely) discussion on GIT.

jsquared










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