Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!sri-unix!quintus!pds From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Version Numbers (Re: The Next Generation) Message-ID: <296@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> Date: Mon, 30-Nov-87 17:19:05 EST Article-I.D.: cresswel.296 Posted: Mon Nov 30 17:19:05 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 3-Dec-87 06:08:46 EST References: <5294@ccicpg.UUCP> <2803@cbmvax.UUCP> <516@mcdsun.UUCP> <1604@bsu-cs.UUCP> Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA Lines: 17 Summary: Compress old versions Version numbers can be VERY useful. They have saved me a lot of time on several occasions. But they DO take up a lot of space. So why not do the sort of thing SCCS does: store previous versions as a set of differences from the following versions. Thus getting back (or looking at) old versions (which you wouldn't do very often) would be pretty slow, but the disk space cost would be drastically reduced. SCCS uses line-by-line diffs, which isn't very good, but you could easily use a byte-by-byte diff scheme, which would be more general, and sometimes smaller. The code to compute the differences and reconstruct old versions from newer ones plus a set of diffs could be incorporated into the kickstart or workbench. Remember, multiple versions are good for more than backup, they also let you ask questions like: what have I done to this file lately? -- -Peter