On Wednesday 18 May 2005 08:12 pm, Don Calfa wrote:
> How would subversion be better?  Isn't a binary file a binary file a
> binary file as far as versioning systems?

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/apas08.html

"In the most general sense, Subversion handles binary files more 
gracefully than CVS does. Because CVS uses RCS, it can only store 
successive full copies of a changing binary file. But internally, 
Subversion expresses differences between files using a 
binary-differencing algorithm, regardless of whether they contain textual 
or binary data. That means that all files are stored differentially 
(compressed) in the repository, and small differences are always sent 
over the network."

> I know that Visual Source Safe is pretty awful in a worst case scenario
> rebuild whereas CVS can be rebuilt fairly easy in case of a
> catastrophic failure.
> I haven't worked with subversion but from reading a competing
> versioning system marketing, subversion stores it's repository
> information in the same data mess that VSS has.

Subversion does use a database on the back end.  It has a facility to dump 
the database to a text backup file and import the same.  Doing this along 
with standard backup procedures makes it pretty safe.  Also, they were 
very close or already have a change with a filesystem on the back end 
instead of a database, just as CVS does.

> I don't see how storing a binary file with a timestamp is a bad thing
> even if it does grow rather fast.  Disks are cheap today at $.50 a gig.

Storing binaries in CVS is still beneficial, don't get me wrong.  
Timestamps, logs, tagging, etc. all work just fine and are very useful.  
I just wanted to warn about the lack of a diff and that the repository 
will grow pretty fast.  If you want to provide the storage required, go 
for it.  Subversion was designed to overcome these weaknesses in CVS.

All of this is stated by one who uses CVS every day and really, really 
likes it over VSS.

Alan
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