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

Jp Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Tue Sep 7 22:59:17 CEST 2004

(This is somewhat off-topic for python-dev, so I won't post more than =

one message unless people really want me to)

Martin v. L=F6wis wrote:

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.

Files are, by and large, big blobs of opaque bytes. They don't =

belong in a database. The subversion developers made a mistake by =

putting everything into bdbs. They should have put metadata into the =

database and files into the filesystem. I doubt this is the =

disadvantage perceived by the svn user community at large (they mostly =

complain about umask problems), but it is the real problem with using =

bdb in the way svn uses it.

[snip] =

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

This is half-true. You don't have to dump/load to move between =

incompatible database versions, you just have to run the =

sleepycat-supplied upgrade tool. Not to say that dump/load doesn't work...

Jp

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list