[Gnu-arch-users] Re: archive storage format comments on the size

[Miles Bader]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
>     Pau> The problem is that it can become very big with kernel
>     Pau> archives. Maybe it's better to cache revisions.
> 
> I don't think so.  Revision libraries are likely to scale well along
> the # of files dimension, since each revision is likely to be near
> minimum size (ie, a large collection of hard links with a small number
> of changed files)

Note that on a large tree, having a revlib for _every_ revision is still
a bad idea -- all those directories really do start to add up, as do
duplicated parts of files (if a small patch is applied to a file, the
rest of the file is overhead).

However, they are very useful at greater intervals; I already use the
poor-man's version of revlibs, `cp -a', to keep every released linux
tree, and I'm sure many others too.

-Miles
-- 
80% of success is just showing up.  --Woody Allen