I wanted to create an archive of all released Gnumeric versions.
Gnumeric’s CVS tree saw a lot of hacking on the ,v files so neither
CVS nor the derived SVN tree are useful for reconstructing past
releases. They are useful for tracking a given file’s history
minus the renames it went through.
So I hacked up a script to create a git archive for me. (You cannot actually run that script, though: it hits a “tar” bug — ick! And after hacking that, beware that it takes a long, long time to run.)
Total size of 172 tar files: 1508026377 bytes.
Total size of git archive: 139733921 bytes
Ratio: 10.8
Not too shabby, eh? Even if the corpus is pretty special.
Seeing what changed between releases is as
simple as git diff -u GNUMERIC_1_7_0..GNUMERIC_1_7_1
and very fast.