[Python-Dev] Subversion

["Martin v. Löwis"]

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