On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 7:57 AM, Colin Putney <cputney at wiresong.ca> wrote:

> The other big problem is that tens of thousands of tiny files is a horribly
> inefficient way to store source code. Yes, disk is cheap. But disk IO is
> not. I discovered this early in the development of MC2, when I implemented a
> type of repository that stored each method in a separate file. Loading
> OmniBrowser from that repository involved opening, reading, and closing over
> 600 files, and was very slow. I don't remember the exact timing, but I think
> it was like 5 to 10 minutes, and in any case it was far too slow. Avi wrote
> a repository that stored every thing in a single indexed file, and now load
> time is dominated by compilation.

It's worth pointing out that file-based version control has advanced
significantly since we did this work - CVS and SVN are now far from
the state of the art.  I haven't used git much, for example, but it
seems to be a well layered system, and it may be that we can build an
alternative front end to its database which is image-based rather than
working directory based.  For example, imagine comparing an image
directly to this index file rather than to a directory full of files
on disk:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#the-index

And look at this description of the workflow:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#the-workflow

I personally believe that we're better off with Smalltalk-specific
version control, but if someone *is* looking at integration with more
mainstream tools, I would strongly suggest they start with git rather
than SVN.

Avi