version/revision control software for things mostly not source

[Dan Naumov]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Gene <fbsd at brightstar.bomgardner.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:08:49 +0300, Dan Naumov wrote
>> I think I am reaching the point where I want to have some kind of
>> sane and easy to use version/revision control software for my
>> various personal files and small projects. We are talking about
>> varied kind of data, ranging from binary format game data (I have
>> been doing FPS level design as a hobby for over a decade) to .doc
>> office documents to ASCI text formatted game data. Most of the data
>> is not plaintext. So far I have been using a hacked together mix of
>> things, mostly a combination of essentially storing each revision of
>> any given file a separate file001, file002, file003, etc which while
>> easy to use and understand, seems rather space-inefficient and a
>> little bit of ZFS snapshotting, however I want something better.
>>
>
>> Sadly, FreeBSD's ZFS doesn't have dedup or this functionality
>> would've been easy to implement with my current hacked together methods.
>> Performance does't matter all that much (unless we are talking
>> something silly like a really crazy IO bottleneck), since the only
>> expected user is just me and perhaps a few friends.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> - Sincerely,
>> Dan Naumov
>
> Someone else mentioned Subversion and Tortoisesvn. I use these tools for
> revision management of 600 or so powerpoints, graphics, and other
> miscellaneous files that we use for church services. Once up and running, it's
> simplicity itself. I also use websvn to allow read only access to individual
> files via a browser. I've found it works like a charm.
>
>
> ---
> IHN,
> Gene

I've looked at SVN and it looks reasonably easy to grok, but reading
the "Version Control with Subversion" book... it seems there is no
actual way to truly erase/delete/destoy/purge a part of an existing
repository? This sounds rather weird and annoying. What if I decide
that project XYZ is beyond redemption and abandon it, I delete the
working copy of it, but all history is still in there, gigabytes upon
gigabytes of data. With no way to remove it, it sounds like a really
big limitation.


- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov