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Re: CVS and Binaries


From: Lee Sau Dan
Subject: Re: CVS and Binaries
Date: 31 Oct 2001 10:38:31 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7

>>>>> "Guy" == Guy Scharf <address@hidden> writes:

    Guy> Sau Dan Lee <address@hidden> wrote:
    >>  For your case, I think you'll be better of saving the binary
    >> files with names containing version numbers (manually
    >> assigned).  There is no space lost with this method (since
    >> there is no generic way to diff two binary files to produce a
    >> minimal diff result).  Moreover, one of the most useful
    >> function of CVS is to diff arbitrary versions.  With binary
    >> files, you don't have this useful feature anyway.

    Guy> I'm puzzled by what would be gained by saving two different
    Guy> versions of a binary file as separate entities rather than as
    Guy> a new version.  If you have file.doc version 1.1 and commit
    Guy> an update to 1.2, then the repository file.doc,v file
    Guy> increases in size.  If you add the new file as file-1.doc,
    Guy> you've used approximately the same amount of disk space in
    Guy> the repository, haven't you?  The disk space will be in two
    Guy> ,v files instead of 1.  At least in browsing through binaries
    Guy> in our repository suggests no space savings would result in
    Guy> checking in the files separately as opposed to updating an
    Guy> existing file.

Yes.  So, there is negligible difference in disk space consumption.

But a very huge ,v file  could be problematic.  You know, CVS/RCS have
to look  for tags starting with  the "@" for  the control information.
So, having large ,v files would make checkins and checkouts slow.


    Guy> It's much more convenient, from a management point of view,
    Guy> to use the update mechanism rather than to keep changing file
    Guy> names.  At least for binary files that change relatively
    Guy> infrequently.  I don't think that using CVS would be good for
    Guy> binary files that changed frequently (such as a database).

Yeah, that's OK for  *small* and infrequently changed binaries.  E.g.,
I  used  to  keep  a  "lib"  subdirectory  of  some  third-party  (but
open-source) .jar files  of my Java projects.  When  we feel we needed
to  update those  files (which  is once  in a  few months),  we simply
checked in  the new  .jar files  and retest.  So,  we know  which .jar
files worked with which versions of our own code.

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    address@hidden(HZ) 
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| e-mail: address@hidden    http://www.csis.hku.hk/~sdlee |
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