4 ms·
I still use RCS occasionally for versioning single files, although the speed and ease of initialization of Git make it not so useful these days. Incidentally,
by comex 13y ago
I still use RCS occasionally for versioning single files, although the speed and ease of initialization of Git make it not so useful these days. Incidentally, having maintained RCS history for a large file that made it up to 1.1677, I discovered that GNU RCS is very inefficient at applying the reverse line-based diffs in order to retrieve an old revision - rcs takes 27 seconds to retrieve 1.1 while my small Python implementation takes 0.5 seconds. I guess it probably keeps in-memory data in a contiguous buffer rather than an array of lines?
- gwu78 13y agoCan you post your ,v file somewhere? I'd like to try to replicate your experiment, using my rcs(1) and cvs(1). While I'm impressed that your Python script is quick, I'm not sure that Python is ever "small" compared to any POSIX-like UNIX userland utility. An accurate perspective of the size of any "Python implementation" would account for (a) all the files you need to install on top of a POSIX-like UNIX userland in order to get Python to run and to run your script and (b) the fact that the OS Torvalds would have used if not for the AT&T lawsuit, namely BSD, does not include Python in the base install. If Python were truly "small", I'd consider it for use in embedded systems.