Poor example in "Look Ma! No Network!

[schoon at hsva.de]

bmathus at gmail.com wrote on 24.10.2006 09:21:51:

> Hoho, is someone exploding? :-).

No, it's not that bad. I am perfectly happy at having 
raised the issue, I am not the one writing the book, and 
my name will, for good reasons, not be listed along the 
glorious authors.

> Well, I have read the part you're speaking about, and I can't this any
> problem. In fact, I'd accept the extract you gave could have been
> misleading, but not really with the whole sentence from
> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch03s05.html
> 
> You say :
> > I find it misleading since we don't have to send the
> > entire file in order to communicate such a change.
> >
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, you're speaking about the possibility to send
> only the diff when there's a modification in the file, but this is
> exactly what the paragraph you're criticising is about :

Well not quite.

The way I interpret the justification of the example, is that it 
tries to demonstrate the benefit of keeping a local copy of the 
unaltered file, since that will save us the trouble of sending 
the entire file back. But, I cannot see that we ever have to do 
that, local pristine copy or not, since there are ways to avoid 
this work.

> > Having this cache is a tremendous benefit—even if you have a fast 
> > net connection, it's much faster to send only a file's changes rather 
> > than the whole file to the server. 

Although the second half of the above sentence is perfectly correct,
it still implies that the cache is needed to pull off the trick, 
which isn't right. There may be other good reasons for the cache,
but I am not sure this is one of them.

> > At first glance, this might not 
> > seem that important, but imagine the repercussions if you try to 
> > commit a one line change to a 400MB file and have to send the whole 
> > file to the server!
> Maybe the last sentence could be a little bit clearer, adding
> "instead of just the difference" at the end, but anyway that wouldn't
> alter the general meaning of the paragraph...

No, the reader is still left with the impression that a local 
copy of the original is required. 

> Please note that I'm not an english native speaker, so I could have
> not thoroughly understood the text. If so, please let me know :-).

Same here, but poor English is the de facto language of the web,
whatever the native speakers may say :-)

Yours

Johannes