2008/6/30 Avi Bryant <avi at dabbledb.com>:
> 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.
>

This is quite interesting.
Really, if we could just avoid using file-based working directory and
make image to be a kind of 'working directory' this would simplify
things  a lot - no need to make file outs and synchronization is
always made between current methods in image and git repository.
Interesting, how much coding needed to connect image with git
repository in that way.

> Avi
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.