Ramblings of Narc

…I’m compiling Subversion. On a 486 (eris).

Then I’ll need some hard-drive space dedicated to the SVN repository and its soon-to-be-myriad of versions, micro-versions, revisions, and such-like, that make the whole shebang work properly. Of course, some parts don’t really belong in the repository, either because they’re too big, or because they’re not really part of the stuff I wrote. And then there’s other parts that aren’t publicly accessible, but need to go into version control anyway.

In total, all the stuff that makes up narc.ro and subdomains is just shy of 2.3 GB. In there, we have duplicates (remaining from various moves like http://www.narc.ro/man/ -> http://man.narc.ro/ ), and we have just short of 350 MB of images (some of them enormously high-quality), and some 1 GB or so of mp3s (sorry, that part is private), not to mention another 225 MB of “temporary” files, some of which are temporary scripts built to play with some random feature or another. The actually important, personally-written, valuable parts probably clock in just over 20 MB or so. Talk about dense packaging — that’s probably three or four years of development, all fitting in so little space it seems almost pitiful.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t include the millions of previous versions of all the files involved, and with that, the repository would probably reach well over 200 MB, and that’s not counting several small, but important backups of the various databases I’ve always cared about.

Think of it like this — about 90% of the code I’ve written has been lost, because there was no reason, at the time, to save it. This code isn’t that valuable in and of itself — after all, most of the various old versions would’ve just been bug-ridden crap that got superseded by revisions of the same files that didn’t have those bugs. Or else we could be talking about versions of a library that didn’t include some particular function, and when a new page was added suddenly that function was required, and added. So it’s not that big a loss.

However, you get to a point where you look at what you have, and you say “You know, this stuff is barely enough to fill 13 floppy disks, have I really done so little? The old versions, the bug fixes, the little “HACK HACK HACK” comments that got replaced by real code, or the functions that were perfectly good but had to be rewritten to provide a more uniform “look”, or to use a particular new helper function that made the work of debugging a lot easier — all that stuff is impossible to see. So, for all the work I did creating these 20 MB, all I have to show for it is the latest version, with no real sense of how much has gone before.

Which is why I’m changing things now. With subversion now installed (make install finished just as I was typing this), it’s time to give Eris an extra hard-drive, and put all the stuff I care about into SVN. And then run commits every once in a while.

*whistles* I’m on my way… to structured programming…