Re: Why does CVS COPY a file (binary) to tag it? Can this be overridden?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 05:31:11PM +0000, Schlitz wrote:
> If I have a 1 MB binary in CVS , and I only apply a tag to it-
> making no changes, not commiting it or anything, does CVS store
> a whole new copy just because of the tag, or is that just a
> temporary copy and replace of the original?

It's both better and worse than you suspect.

The ,v file does NOT grow by 1 MB, but only by:
        strlen(tag_name) + strlen(rev_number) + K
bytes, where K is approximately 3.

To make the change, however, CVS uses a copy-and-rename strategy,
rather than modifying the ,v file in place.  So it must make a
temporary copy of the ,v file; and for reasons that Larry Jones
has recently explained, the copy must live in the same filesystem
as the original -- it can't go into /tmp.  Now, ,v files for
binaries tend to grow quickly, since binaries tend not to "diff"
very efficiently; thus, the amount of space needed *temporarily*
can easily be many times the size of the file in your working
directory.  But again, that's only temporary; the space needed
*permanently* is only a few bytes.

--

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|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
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