[Monotone-devel] Re: [from svn list] Case study: Mono switches to Subversion

[Bruce Stephens]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> CVS and RCS does the annotate part quickly because the repository
> file format contains information about exactly which lines are
> changed in every change, so all the server part needs to do is to
> read that file and do all the calculations.  I've no idea what the
> requirements to do the same thing is for svn, but it's obviously not
> quite that easy.  If we added an annotate to monotone, I'm not at
> all sure how it would be handled, as I currently have no clue what
> the deltas really contain.

As far as I know svn and monotone are basically equivalent in that
sense: they both store something like xdelta information, which is
good for constructing the files, but not good for getting line-based
diffs.  CVS is line-based, of course.

I'd have thought monotone ought to be generally faster since it uses a
local database, whereas with subversion you either have the server do
it (which puts lots of work on the shared server), or you need the
client to get lots of information over a network.

[...]