Re: CVS and gdbm?

[Max Bowsher]

address@hidden wrote:
> On  5 Sep, Max Bowsher wrote:
>>  > Is there any further info on configuring CVS to use gdbm?  Especially,
>>  > benchmarks?
>>
>>  No benchmarks, but the "appropriate edits" to use gdbm exist in the
Cygwin
>>  package of cvs.
>
> Interesting.  That would explain the recent Cygwin announcement of the
> need to use the conversion program following the recent changes to gdbm.
>
> So I take it that there's some benefit seen in using gdbm; presumably
> related to performance?  But that for some reason it's not considered
> the right choice to make it the default for Unix.  (Perhaps because
> Unix people prefer to use plain text where possible, to leverage from
> all those existing plain text utilities.)

There are 2 separate issues - text/dbm and ndbm/gdbm.

text/dbm:
This is supposed to be an optimization option for repositories with truly
huge modules and/or val-tags files. I don't know of any benchmarks to
quantify the effect.

ndbm/gdbm:
ndbm (.dir/.pag) is not functional on FAT filesystems, hence not suitable
for use on Cygwin.

Max.