Re: Trimming old diffs to save space

[Ed Avis]

On 13 Aug 2003, Paul Eggert wrote:

>>I am writing a tool to strip out old revisions from an RCS file while
>>leaving the log messages.  This is purely to save disk space.
>
>I like Larry Jones's suggestions, but I can't resist asking:
>
>To save disk space?  Which costs less than $1/GB?

Some people do have disk quotas, you know...

>What sort of RCS files are these, anyway?  Are you checking in
>versions of video streams, or something like that?

No, these particular files are test data, containing expected output
from commands.  The output depends on the command itself (which is a
Perl script under version control) and on the input files (which are
also under version control).  The test suite tries to exercise almost
every option so there is a fair number of these expected
outputs.  Having outdated versions of the test suite is not that
useful, I do not anticipate checking out old versions of the input
data and running 'make test', nor wanting to retest older buggy
versions of the code.  However I would like a revision history of the
project.

(Project is <http://membled.com/work/apps/respell/>.)

For me the disk space saving will not be that great - the repository
uses only 19Mbyte altogether - but I imagine some people might want to
keep image files or other big things under version control.

The suggestion of using rcs -o to outdate does sound better, except
that it loses log messages.  Would it be possible to change rcs -o so
it pastes the logs for outdated revisions into the log for the next
still-existing revision?

-- 
Ed Avis <ed@membled.com>