Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 08:38:13AM -0600, Kevin Puetz wrote:
>> But svn keeps local copies of the pristine plaintexts, which allows
>> status, revert, diff (against the base revision), and probably some
>> others to be local-only operations, and lets commit send diffs instead
>> of fulltext. It's a trade of WC size to increase the speed of common
>> operations and reduce network bandwidth usage.
>> 
> fwiw, i think this is the reason, why the linux kernel guys are now
> seriously considering copy-on-write semantics for hardlinks.

COW hardlinks would be perfect for this sort of thing :-)

> on another note, with an editor that detaches a modified file when it
> writes it, one could save the copy, too. doesn't svn offer such a mode?

Hmm, I don't think so, but it would be interesting. And svn already has
checksums and such on the copies in the text-base to protect against the
inevitable situation where you use an editor that screws it up :-)