Reduce Subversion pristine copy

Subversion VCS store copy of each file pristine directory placed in own hidden .svn directory.

Possible methods of reducing pristine size:

Built-in mechanism in subversion client itself

This features could be implemented directly to client in some later 1.8+ version .

There is already opened Issue 525 named "allow working copies without text-base/"

File deduplication of working copy

It could possibly work on filesystem level with existing filesystems or as virtual filesystem.

One example could be Scord which solve this for versions <= 1.6 on Linux platform

Make pristine files zero size by helper program

It maybe possible to temporary make pristine file empty and update their content manually by invoking come helper program. Such program could check svn status and download correct content of modified files from repository to be able to commit them. Set zero size to other pristine files. Such program should be able to work with svn sqlite database to read file name to pristine name relation. Also it should be multi-platform.

#!/bin/bash

for F in $(find ./.svn/pristine -type f -size +0);
do
cat /dev/null >$F
done

If pristine files are set to empty then all svn operation could be used except these related to file content as svn diff or svn commit of modified files. To be able also work with file diff, pristine file content should be restored from repository somehow.

External links

• Missing pristine files in SVN working copy