On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Colin Putney wrote:

> I've begun to think that what we really want is eager copying of
> verison *info* and lazy copying of versions themselves. Then all the
> clients have a clear picture of what the version tree looks like, but
> you only need to ship around the bulk of the data when you actually
> need it for a load or merge.

Yeah, that's obviously a good optimization.

I think it could quite possibly be introduced as exactly that, however.
Say you started out by eagerly downloading Versions.  Then you introduce a
RemoteVersion that only stores the metadata, but hangs onto a URL for the
full thing for the first time it's asked for its #snapshot instead of
#info or #package.

Hopefully this could be done by selectively reading parts of the zip file
rather than breaking it into two parts.