[Python-Dev] Subversion (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Sep 7 22:51:28 CEST 2004

Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:

(I'm really looking forward to Subversion 1.1; all the advantage of Subversion, without the disadvantage of Berkeley DB...!)

What is the disadvantage of Berkeley DB that the file storage of svn 1.1 will remove? One of the things that you could do in CVS that you can't easily do because of the DB approach is to ultimately remove a file, along with its entire history (by removing the ,v file). Along with that goes the option of moving part of a repository into another repository.

Neither is either with svn because of the DB thing. However, I understand that it won't become simpler with the file storage, either, as the files being created don't directly correlate to files of the versions file system. So you still can't delete a single file with all of its history, nor can you move just a part of the repository.

Of course, you can do both with svndump|svnfilter|svnload, so that is not a serious obstacle.

One problem that I had with svn+bsddb is that the DB files are tied to a DB version, so you can't easily upgrade to a newer DB version (without dump/load cycle). But a) don't do that, then, and b) for the last 3 or so bsddb updates (since 4.0), it wasn't that bad - the SVN repositories would have continued to work, as the bsddb format didn't change in a relevant way.

Regards, Martin

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