On 1/15/07, Alex Powell <alexp(a)exscien.com> wrote:
I didn't mean for text, though that was the
logical conclusion. I mean for
the image and media repositories. SVN seems to be quite good and managing
deltas between binaries these days...
I suspect that for most MediaWiki applications, binary deltas are not
very useful for media content. Revised versions of images tend not to
have much binary similarity to prior or subsequent versions; it's more
common for a revised version to be subjected to a global change (such
as resizing, recropping, or a global color balance) than to a local
change. The same is probably true of most audio media.
In my experience doing enterprise disaster recovery and backup,
subfile incrementals are usually only useful for uncompressed,
unencrypted, segmented files updated in a chunky manner (most database
systems), and obviously for logfiles which are always appended to or
used in a circular manner. None of these file types is likely to be
frequently uploaded to a MediaWiki installation in most applications I
can envision. Any file which is completely rewritten every time it is
touched (which includes virtually all media formats other than pure,
uncompressed raw formats) will not benefit from incremental subfile
versioning.
Kelly