On 1/15/07, Alex Powell alexp@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