Re: CVS migration to subversion?

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Peter Williams wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 19:49, James Henstridge wrote:
>  
>
> > The SVN feature set does look quite compelling, but some of the problems 
> > listed on the inconveniences page look _very_ inconvenient for a project 
> > like Gnome :)
> >    
>
> Another potential problem is that their metadata seems pretty huge. I
> checked out the source to svn and the working directory was 48 MB; after
> "find -name .svn |xargs rm -Rf", it was 15. The gnome CVS mirrors seem
> to keep on running out of space as it is, and svn would probably not
> help in that regard.
>  
Note that a pristine working copy with SVN will probably be about twice 
the size of the equivalent CVS working copy.  This is because it stores 
an unmodified copy of the source files, so that it can perform diffs to 
the most recent repository version of the file locally, and be able to 
send diffs to the server during a commit.  They made the decision that 
network bandwidth was more precious than diskspace, which is probably 
correct.

Of course, the size of working copies is not very relative to the anon 
cvs servers.  The size of the repository is much more relevant.  I don't 
know what the relative sizes of SVN and CVS repos are.  I would guess 
that in some cases SVN would come out on top due to being able to store 
binary diffs.  It would be interesting to know what the difference is 
for a source code base like Gnome CVS.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/