Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Libraries and changesets

[Aaron Bentley]

On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 02:31, Tom Lord wrote:
[snip]
> "just started" ... "star-merged" ....  "doubled size"
> 
> So, how does the total size compare to a few copies of your whole
> tree?   Probably about the same.   

Yes.

That'd be expected for the scenario
> you vaguely describe -- it's not the expected rate of sustained growth
> over a longer period of time.

Sure, you'd only have doubling the second time you got a revision.  But
a sustained growth rate of 20M per star-merge looks unappealing.

> 
> What's far more interesting, imo, is what happens when your libraries
> start having hundreds or thousands of revisions -- the result of
> sustained work over a long period of time.  I think you'll find that
> they grow quite slowly if you measure their growth in dollars per
> byte.

Fair enough.  There are other costs, though.  I've had to clean up my
home directory several times to have enough space for Arch, so for me,
there's been a frustration cost.  I probably will install another hard
disk, but I'd prefer not to need to.

> When I first added revlibs, around two years ago, my worst-case
> projection was that my fairly dinky disk would be full by now.   In
> fact, I've used about 10% of it for revlibs.

It's also possible that we have different useage patterns.  I'd like to
star-merge your tree fairly frequently.

> if
> you're just looking at the numbers after the first few additions in a
> couple of different branches: those aren't likely to be typical;
> you're just priming the pump.

I'll see how it goes.  I didn't want to complain though, I'd rather look
for positive alternatives.  Archives seem very efficient.  Compressed
revlibs would also save wads of space-- I've seen tla--devo--1.2 shrink
by an order of magnitude as a bzip2ed tar.

But I'm new to this problem domain, so I'm asking "why" a lot.  Sorry
about that-- it probably gets old fast.

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.