Re: Kernel SCM saga..

David S. Miller
2005-04-09T22:58:07Z

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005 22:45:18 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:

> Also, I don't want people editing repostitory files by hand. Sure, the
> sha1 catches it, but still... I'd rather force the low-level ops to use
> the proper helper routines. Which is why it's a raw zlib compressed blob,
> not a gzipped file.

I understand the arguments for compression, but I hate it for one
simple reason: recovery is more difficult when you corrupt some
file in your repository.

It's happened to me more than once and I did lose data.

Without compression, I might be able to recover if something
causes a block of zeros to be written to the middle of some
repository file. With compression, you pretty much just lose.