Hi friends! Is there any way that TortoiseSVN compress files when using an online repository? Is that possible? Thanks in advance.

I am pretty sure it does because when i download my entire project, it takes up a lot more room on my machine than it does in the actual repository. The only way I can see that as being possible is through compression. Also, I am pretty sure the difference between revisions is done in diff files instead of being an entire separate copy of the file.

Quote: Original post by landagen
I am pretty sure it does because when i download my entire project, it takes up a lot more room on my machine than it does in the actual repository. The only way I can see that as being possible is through compression. Also, I am pretty sure the difference between revisions is done in diff files instead of being an entire separate copy of the file.

Do you mean TortoiseSVN already has implemented (and uses automatically) that feature?

Sorry, I misread your question. I do not know specifically for Tortoise SVN. If you need to compress the repository you could just tell windows to compress the folder that the repository is in.

Actually, Tortoise doesn't compress your repository, because it would make your entire repository completely useless to other clients. Tortoise doesn't implement this feature and I doubt it ever will, because many of the commands issues by Tortoise are executed on the server, such as diffs, blames, etc.

And by compressing your data client side, you lose all those abilities, which makes a repository quite useless.

I'm not sure if it's possible enable compression server-side, but that probably requires you to have (shell)-access to the server. But keep in mind that compression will significantly impact server performance, because for all the action you'll run on your repos, SVN will have to uncompress the files, and in later stages re-compress them.

And about the working copy size being much larger than the server-side HEAD version: All SVN clients keep a lot of additional files in .svn folders for housekeeping purposes. One of this is that all the files are doubled: You have your working copy ones, and in the .svn folders are a copy of the files so the 'check for modifications' can be done locally by comparing the files with the housekeeping files. This keeps server load low and response times fast.

Toolmaker

I was under the impression that Subversion already uses zlib for compressing diffs.

Thanks for replies, but I think I did a wrong question.

My question was if TortoiseSVN compress data that is going to be sent over Internet. I don't care how is stored on hard disk, just on the net, I ask this because I'm using an online repository, and sometimes it takes a while to upload large files.
Do you understand me now? (obviusly English is not my main language, and sometimes I have problems to express myself)

Thanks!

The internet connection itself generally takes care of compressing things in transit. Don't believe me? Make a huge text file with the same word over and over, then try uploading it to Rapidshare or something.