Managing a photo library with bzr

[David Cournapeau]

Sébastien Barthélemy wrote:
>
> Do you think RCS or SVN could do the trick ? I could also compute and
> store deltas by myself, but I would prefer a widely used tool.
>   

svn handles binary files much better than bzr (and any DVCS for that
matter), not because it is smarter, but because it is relatively easy to
implement in a centralized server, I believe. Although bzr is worse in
that matter compared to git and hg, it is not much worse. git itself is
not conceived to handle big files:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2006/2/8/200591

I think it is inherent to DVCS because if you need those big files, you
will quickly blow up your repository's size, and it will impact
everybody. Whereas in centralized VCS, since you are working at the file
level, you can just skip the file if you want. That's one fundamental
limitation of DVCS compared to centralized ones, IMHO, at least with the
current systems.

I don't know about commercial DVCS, though; I would guess they handle it
better because using binary files in proprietary softwares is more
prevalent; in particular for video games, this is a big problem. You may
find some useful info for your use-case by looking at Timothee Bisset (A
ID Software developer) website:

http://ttimo.vox.com/library/post/git-duplicity-and-dupinanny.html

cheers,

David