Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Some issues

[Michael Poole]

Tom Lord writes:

>     > 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.

Disk space isn't the only metric to look at; bandwidth is another.  My
only practical "broadband" connection at home is 144 kbps IDSL --
about 1 MB/minute -- and some are stuck on modems.  Having a
binary-friendly diff would help people who dealt with big binary files
over slow connections.  So far, though, I have never run into that
problem; and perhaps people who do work on such large files work
around it in some other fashion.  The question seems largely academic
to me.

Michael