Re: history of the tags (was: hitory of the tags)

[Laine Stump]

Donald Sharp <address@hidden> writes:

> The thing that really concerns me about this is that the history file
> can get quite large and will tend to grow much quicker now with these
> changes. 

This is the problem I have with it too. Any such "history" feature
that isn't scalable without needing to regularly trim off the "old"
history is of extremely limited value. It is especially bad if it
creates problems for those who don't need/want its info.

It's too bad the RCS file format doesn't put dates with the tag info,
but of course even that would be just an "acceptable" (still not
ideal) solution to a single problem. Perhaps it's time to think about
adding a new and different type of storage to the server side of CVS,
based on some sort of simple database format. This would take more
thought, discussion, and design than just adding on something that
uses the currently available data files, but we'd end up with
something more useful and expandable in the long run.

Having said that, I agree that, in the current framework, the best
solution is for people wanting that info to install a taginfo script.

> For instance we had a repository with a history
> file that was 118megs.

And imagine how large it would be if it had <number of tags> * <number
of files> more lines in it!

>  Parsing that took quite some time, and in the
> end we just removed the history file as that we didn't feel that it 
> actually provided us with usefull information.