[Gnu-arch-users] Re: implicit discussion

[Miles Bader]

Martin Pool <address@hidden> writes:
> >  (2) Don't bloat up your disk with tons of small-files-that-the-file-
> >      system-makes-large (and even if _you_ use reiserfs or whatever,
> >      consider your other developers -- some of who might be stuck using
> >      ext2).
> 
> Of course since you will usually have a whole second copy of the tree
> as a pristine or library, the cost of the ids will usually be
> relatively small.

Such copies of the source tree have their own .id files, so it doesn't
change the proportion of wasted space (though in absolute terms, of
course, the copies make the problem even worse).

.id files can actually consume a significant fraction of the space used
by a source tree.  In a old post to this list, I calculated the overhead
for some common source trees (gcc, linux, glibc, etc), and in some cases
the .id files would account for more than half the disk space used by a
source tree!

Here's the post:

   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.arch.user/16352

> I rather like that id files can be simply renamed, deleted, etc
> without needing to actually edit a file.  Amongst other things, it
> means a changeset that modifies them can still be well represented as
> a diff.

Previous discussion of such alternate representations has usually
assumed extending the diff mechanism a bit (though this is a feature
some people want anyway).

It occurs to me that one [damned kludgey!] way of working around this
would be to separate entries in such an "list of ids" files with enough
newlines to defeat diff's context lines and hunk merging (the space used
by the newlines would be relatively insignificant).  But yeah, wow ugly.

-Miles
-- 
"Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure,
and demoralizing.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the
future of the world depends." -Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"