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The unit for compressed storage in bzr is a *revfile*, whose design
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was suggested by Matt Mackall.
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Compressed storage is a tradeoff between several goals:
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* Reasonably compact storage of long histories.
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* Robustness and simplicity.
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* Fast extraction of versions and addition of new versions (preferably
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without rewriting the whole file, or reading the whole history.)
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* Fast and precise annotations.
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* Storage of files of at least a few hundred MB.
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revfiles store the history of a single logical file, which is
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identified in bzr by its file-id. In this sense they are similar to
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an RCS or CVS ``,v`` file or an SCCS sfile.
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Each state of the file is called a *text*.
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Renaming, adding and deleting this file is handled at a higher level
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by the inventory system, and is outside the scope of the revfile. The
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revfile name is typically based on the file id which is itself
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typically based on the name the file had when it was first added. But
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this is purely cosmetic.
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For example a file now called ``frob.c`` may have the id
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``frobber.c-12873`` because it was originally called
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``frobber.c``. Its texts are kept in the revfile
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``.bzr/revfiles/frobber.c-12873.revs``.
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When the file is deleted from the inventory the revfile does not
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change. It's just not used in reproducing trees from that point
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The revfile does not record the date when the text was added, a commit
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message, properties, or any other metadata. That is handled in the
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higher-level revision history.
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Inventories and other metadata files that vary from one version to the
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next can themselves be stored in revfiles.
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revfiles store files as simple byte streams, with no consideration of
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translating character sets, line endings, or keywords. Those are also
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handled at a higher level. However, the revfile may make use of
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knowledge that a file is line-based in generating a diff.
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(The Python builtin difflib is too slow when generating a purely
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byte-by-byte delta so we always make a line-by-line diff; when this
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is fixed it may be feasible to use line-by-line diffs for all
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Files whose text does not change from one revision to the next are
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stored as just a single text in the revfile. This can happen even if
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the file was renamed or other properties were changed in the
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The revfile is held on disk as two files: an *index* and a *data*
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file. The index file is short and always read completely into memory;
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the data file is much longer and only the relevant bits of it,
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identified by the index file, need to be read.
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In previous versions, the index file identified texts by their
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SHA-1 digest. This was unsatisfying for two reasons. Firstly it
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assumes that SHA-1 will not collide, which is not an assumption we
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wish to make in long-lived files. Secondly for annotations we need
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to be able to map from file versions back to a revision.
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Texts are identified by the name of the revfile and a UUID
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corresponding to the first revision in which they were first
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introduced. This means that given a text we can identify which
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revision it belongs to, and annotations can use the index within the
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revfile to identify where a region was first introduced.
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We cannot identify texts by the integer revision number, because
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that would limit us to only referring to a file in a particular
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I'd like to just use the revision-id, but those are variable-length
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strings, and I'd like the revfile index to be fixed-length and
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relatively short. UUIDs can be encoded in binary as only 16 bytes.
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Perhaps we should just use UUIDs for revisions and be done?
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This is meant to scale to hold 100,000 revisions of a single file, by
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which time the index file will be ~4.8MB and a bit big to read
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Some of the reserved fields could be used to implement a (semi?)
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balanced tree indexed by SHA1 so we can much more efficiently find the
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index associated with a particular hash. For 100,000 revs we would be
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able to find it in about 17 random reads, which is not too bad.
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This performs pretty well except when trying to calculate deltas of
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really large files. For that the main thing would be to plug in
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something faster than difflib, which is after all pure Python.
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Another approach is to just store the gzipped full text of big files,
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though perhaps that's too perverse?
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Because the basis of a delta does not need to be the text's logical
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predecessor, we can adjust the deltas to avoid ever needing to apply
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too many deltas to reproduce a particular file.
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Annotations indicate which revision of a file first inserted a line
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(or region of bytes).
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Given a string, we can write annotations on it like so: a sequence of
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*(index, length)* pairs, giving the *index* of the revision which
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introduced the next run of *length* bytes. The sum of the lengths
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must equal the length of the string. For text files the regions will
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typically fall on line breaks. This can be transformed in memory to
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other structures, such as a list of *(index, content)* pairs.
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When a line was inserted from a merge revision then the annotation for
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that line should still be the source in the merged branch, rather than
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just being the revision in which the merge took place.
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They can cheaply be calculated when inserting a new text, but are
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expensive to calculate after the fact because that requires searching
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back through all previous text and all texts which were merged in. It
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therefore seems sensible to calculate them once and store them.
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To do this we need two operators which update an existing annotated
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A. Given an annotated file and a working text, update the annotation to
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mark regions inserted in the working file as new in this revision.
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B. Given two annotated files, merge them to produce an annotated
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result. When there are conflicts, both texts should be included
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These may be repeated: after a merge there may be another merge, or
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there may be manual fixups or conflict resolutions.
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So what we require is given a diff or a diff3 between two files, map
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the regions of bytes changed into corresponding updates to the origin
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* revfiles use unsigned 32-bit integers both in diffs and the index.
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This should be more than enough for any reasonable source file but
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perhaps not enough for large binaries that are frequently committed.
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Perhaps for those files there should be an option to continue to use
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the text-store. There is unlikely to be any benefit in holding
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deltas between them, and deltas will anyhow be hard to calculate.
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* The append-only design does not allow for destroying committed data,
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as when confidential information is accidentally added. That could
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be fixed by creating the fixed repository as a separate branch, into
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which only the preserved revisions are exported.
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* Should annotations also indicate where text was deleted?
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* This design calls for only one annotation per line, which seems
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standard. However, this is lacking in at least two cases:
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- Lines which originate in the same way in more than one revision,
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through being independently introduced. In this case we would
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apparently have to make an arbitrary choice; I suppose branches
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could prefer to assume lines originated in their own history.
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- It might be useful to directly indicate which mergers included
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which lines. We do have that information in the revision history
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though, so there seems no need to store it for every line.
added
removed
doc/revfile.txt
