Re: SSD TBW

On 8/21/2026 9:54 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:11:09 -0700, Don Y wrote:
> 
>> Also highlights differences (size/timestamp) between the two in
>> those cases when both have a file but they obviously differ I have
>> lots of cases of foo being renamed foo.old on my copy so the remote
>> foo doesn't overwrite it; then foo.older, foo.oldest, etc. -- a
>> place where versioning could be of benefit (but, some other repo
>> might have a different notion of foo that I will have to reconcile
>> with my instances.
> 
> If these are text files, then that is the reason why software
> developers invented version control.

You can use it with binary files, too, if you are careful.
P4 is my goto tool to control executables  and other binaries.

> Git is the premier VCS these
> days; its particular strength is reconciling different versions of a
> file that have forked off from a common ancestor, which sounds like
> your use case.

Yes, I use CVS.  I have "imported" many legacy codebases that were
built with that as the VCS (some even use RCS or SCCS!).  So, it's
easier to recover the history as well as reconstitute different
branches directly.  (moving to git, svn, p4, etc. would mean I would
lose the ability to easily move back through the revision history
to reconstitute particular historical branches as that new VCS would
not have "seen" those versions as they existed at that time.)

The fact that their authors had opted to reuse the same filename
(in this case) for different versions was something I was stuck with.

Giving them ".old", ".older", etc. let me see which "version"
*this* repository considered to be authoritative ("Ah, foo has
the same size as my foo.oldest so no need to download it, even
though it obviously differs from *my* foo")

Add to this the fact that pkgsrc will try to verify the size and hash
of ONE of those foo's that *it* thinks to be authoritative -- though
you don't know which the current version of pkgsrc thinks is the real
one until you try to build whatever references it.

[IIRC, there are tens of thousands of files in the repository and
I don't build everything so no idea when/if I will ever try to resolve
the "foo ambiguity"]

<shrug>  You can control YOUR system but can't do much about
how someone else wants to control theirs.