DVCS vs. Subversion brittleness (was Re: Moving to D)

["Jérôme M. Berger"]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Yes, Brad had posted some statistics of the size of the Git repositories
> for dmd, druntime, and phobos, and yes, they are pretty small.
> Projects which contains practically only source code, and little to no
> binary data are unlikely to grow much and repo size ever be a problem.
> But it might not be the case for other projects (also considering that
> binary data is usually already well compressed, like .zip, .jpg, .mp3,
> .ogg, etc., so VCS compression won't help much).
> 
> It's unlikely you will see converted repositories with a lot of changing
> blob data. DVCS, at the least in the way they work currently, simply
> kill this workflow/organization-pattern.
> I very much suspect this issue will become more important as time goes
> on - a lot of people are still new to DVCS and they still don't realize
> the full implications of that architecture with regards to repo size.
> Any file you commit will add to the repository size *FOREVER*. I'm
> pretty sure we haven't heard the last word on the VCS battle, in that in
> a few years time people are *again* talking about and switching to
> another VCS :( . Mark these words. (The only way this is not going to
> happen is if Git or Mercurial are able to address this issue in a
> satisfactory way, which I'm not sure is possible or easy)
> 
	There are several Mercurial extensions that attempt to address this
issue. See for example: http://wiki.netbeans.org/HgExternalBinaries
or http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BigfilesExtension

	I do not know how well they perform in practice.

		Jerome
-- 
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http://jeberger.free.fr
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