One of the advantages of SVN over CVS as given here is cheap copying and branching. What does cheap copying and branching mean in SVN parlance? How is it different from CVS copying and branching?
What does cheap copying/branching mean for a versioning system like SVN?
version control;svn;branching;cvs
If I read it right cheap copying and branching is the same as lazy copying and branching.In these schemes the file isn't actually copied until it becomes different from the parent file. The system creates a placeholder for the file but when you read the contents it goes back to the main trunk for the contents.This has the main advantage of saving disk space on your server. If you did a full copy of the trunk then you would double the amount of disk space you need on your server. By only actually copying the files that have changed you drastically reduce this requirement. A typical branch will only actually modify a handful or a few hundred files at most.Another significant advantage is that as the files aren't copied until needed the creation of the branch is a very quick operation. This encourages branching as it's now seen as a cheap/quick operation rather than an expensive/slow one. (Thanks to Andres F. and Murph for pointing that out)