[cvsnt] Re: CVSNT does not support *large* binary files (crashesonthem)

[Tony Hoyle]

Serge Nikulin wrote:
>>> Are you talking about "history" here or "log"?
> The size of a ,v file.
> 
,v files themselves are pretty efficient, *however* for a full log you are 
asking it do display the change history for the entire file which means it's 
going to take a long time - processing megabytes (even gigabytes) of data is 
never going to be fast.  In later cvsnt versions things like log -t will skip 
most of the processing as they don't need it - which can be useful on large 
repositories if you only want to list tags for example.

For normal processing only the start of the file is required to gather enough 
information.  You *do* need the memory for at least one revision + some 
overhead - which means ISO images are never going to work in a 32bit OS (all 
versions of CVS and RCS have this and indeed quite possibly all versioning 
systems as you have to build the revision from its deltas somehow).  It's not 
a code limitation but an OS one... Win32 can't allocate more than around 900MB 
to a single application - and this varies depending on configuration so 
there's no way for the program to know what the limit is.

This is completely different to the size of the RCS file as a whole as the 
limitation is the size of a revision not the size of the file - it doesn't get 
significantly larger beyond the processing of extra version information which 
is quite small.

btw. versioning something the size of an ISO image even on a 64bit OS is 
unlikely to be worth the effort as the checkout will take tens of minutes per 
file.  Version its contents instead.

Tony