Question on work-flow for big binary files

[Paul R]

Hi marcus,

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:46:13 +0100, Marcus Lindblom <macke at yar.nu> said:

Marcus> SVN claims to have an efficient server-side diff algorirthm that
Marcus> also works on binary files. I think it's rather recent.

Yes but still, some binary data file will just not be diff-able that
way. Imagine a bitmap file at version 1. You insert a row of pixel at
top and commit version 2. The diff might be much biger than the new file
itself (I have not carried the experimentation in this particular case,
this is just to give a simple example).

To me, binary revisions are not cheap at all. So the workflow is not
quiet the same as for code, because with text files it will take about
just the same space wether you commit a patch in 1 or in 10 revisions.
With binary, each revision will have either a big or a huge cost in
terms of space. To my knowledge, svn tries hard to keep it only big.

Marcus> (I'll probably ping you anyway. :)

Thanks for that.

-- 
  Paul