[Tfug] Using Subversion for my home dir

[Timothy Ottinger]

On Jun 24, 2008, at 2:42 AM, Glen Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Tue Jun 24, 2008 at 12:28:14AM -0700, Matt Jacob wrote:
>> I did find that article initially, but he didn't mention
>> anything about how well Subversion works with larger files or
>> many, many GBs of files. Granted, he did mention that he was
>> thinking about putting his music and larger files under version
>> control, but it was just hypothetical at the time of the
>> article. On the other hand, there's an update on his site that
>> says he's using git now anyway, and I've heard git has better
>> performance than Subversion.
>
> I would seriously recommend not putting large binary files under
> version control unless you *want* versioning on them. If you just
> want to share them across machines you are probably best writing
> a script.

Why is that? As I understand git, it would make only one copy as long  
as the file was never modified, while still tracking file movement  
throughout the file system.  If you're wanting to recreate a directory  
tree as of some point in the past, it might not be a bad idea to use a  
modern version control.  For my money (heh) version control is a  
pretty good backup system.  I would use a DVCS, and push/pull a  
repository at home so that my laptop will stay more or less in sync.

I don't use git because I don't like an app to install so many  
executables with such diverse naming.  But it's fast and pretty cool.   
I used bzr for a while, and am currently enamored with mercurial.   
They're slower, but they're also python. ;-)