Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Some issues

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Matthieu Moy <address@hidden>

    > If you have a 1MB binary file managed by arch, all revisions modifying
    > even a single bit of this  file will contain the full binary. You will
    > quickly end up with a 100Mb archive.

I haven't priced disks (in detail) for years.

You're talking about a 1MB binary file with 50 modifications.  If
spread over a year, that's one modification every week.  We might
expect that some projeccts will bump that rate to, say, 10 to 40 per
week.

You are talking about pennies per year, dude.   Your dad had to
optimize this situation with the constraints you are thinking of (and
therefore, didn't bother but ruled the problem "too hard").  You,
unlike your dad, don't have to worry about it.

Andrew is reading gospel in this thread and he's singing in tune.
Cough up a diff/patch for your favorite non-text file format and arch
can integrate that within days (you must provide the labor for those
days).  Absent a diff/patch for your favorite non-text file format,
you are talking something indistinguishable (form the external
perspective) from gibberish.

    > You may  not find usefull  to reduce the  size of your archive  and of
    > your changesets in this situation, but I do. 

I respect that and therefore merge any proposed changes that help with
that while also improving the code in some other ways.  I reject the
idea of doing anything to support cases like yours at the _expense_ of
the habitability of the code because situations like yours are
dinasours --- they'll go away within our lifetimes, very shortly, in
fact.

-t