On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 08:23:38PM -0400, Larry Jones wrote: > The trade-off is that you have to read the entire file in order to > verify the checksum. Since SCCS has to read the entire file anyway, > there's no additional overhead. RCS, on the other hand, doesn't have to > read all of the diffs, particularly if you're just checking out the head > revision which, in the RCS philosophy, is by far the most common > operation.
True, but an RCS-like format could checksum each individual section, instead of the file as a whole; e.g. one checksum covering the <admin> and all the <delta>'s, and then a checksum for each individual <deltatext>. This still wouldn't catch errors in <deltatext>'s you weren't reading at the moment, but when it did finally catch an error, it'd know right off what was wrong -- none of this random-file-format-error stuff. (No, I'm not suggesting this for RCS or CVS! Just hypothesizing.) -- | | /\ |-_|/ > Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | / When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was all of humanity, except me. - Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs