Question about Source Control

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <bp17s6Fbs18U1 at mid.individual.net>,
Gregory Ewing  <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>Chris Angelico wrote:
>> You can then offer a non-source-control means of downloading that
>> specific revision.
>
>Just keep in mind the downside that you can't then
>push or pull your changes directly back into the main
>repository. You can generate a patch file for the
>project maintainer to apply, however. Hg makes it
>very easy to produce a patch file between any two
>revisions.
>
>Also, unless the project is truly ancient, the
>whole history might not be as big as you expect.
>The code presumably grew to its present size
>incrementally, in an approximately monotonic
>manner, so the sum of all the diffs is probably
>about the same order of magnitude as the current
>code size.
>
>As an experiment, I just cloned a copy of the
>CPython repository, and it's about 300MB. A
>tarball of Python 3.2 that I downloaded and
>compiled earlier is about 75MB. That's a ratio
>of about 4, and CPython is a pretty ancient
>project!

This post made me worry for the first time about one project of
mine (ciforth). It started in 2000 with an msdos assembler file,
and after several hundreds version it has accumulated doc's and test's
and is now usable on linux, windows whatnot.

Since 2000 the cvs style archive has grown to 2 megabyte,
for a current version of 400 kbyte. I kept the smallest of changes,
and at times was very happy I did.

Bottom line, the grow of a source archive cannot keep up
with LAN and Internet speeds and hard disk sizes.

>
>--
>Greg

Groetjes Albert
-- 
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert at spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst