[Expo-tech] files to munge whilst converting VCS

[Mark Shinwell]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2020 at 00:54, Wookey <wookey at wookware.org> wrote:

> I'm also resizing overly large images (few need to be bigger than
> 1024x768, and we have stuff up to 6000x4000) and PDFs which have much
> higher than printer resolution (usually due to lots of included large
> images).
>

This bit seems like a mistake to me, for the following reasons:

- We are losing information that we might, one day, want to use (perhaps in
a context we hadn't thought about yet).  To me this is the overriding
reason not to do this.  I also know how keen you are on preserving data so
I'm maybe missing something here.

- The extra decrease in repository size seems negligible.  Even cloning a
repo of 1Gb over my phone connection should only take ten minutes max --
and my home internet connection (which is not the fastest available) is
more than an order of magnitude faster.  Changes of a couple of hundred Mb
basically don't make any difference here.  Local storage is also way beyond
these numbers now even on small devices.

- The resolution of 1024x768 (even more so for 640x480) hasn't been
relevant for a very long time now :)  Reducing images to this size makes
them appear frustratingly small on modern high-resolution displays (for
example on the machine I'm typing this email on, an image of that size
would be barely 10cm across on a 16" screen).  It also makes any image,
that might have been suitable for printing, now unsuitable for printing.

- I would be concerned about rewriting PDF files simply because it's prone
to going wrong (inherently difficult, writers/readers being non-compliant
with the standard, etc).  Are you sure they haven't been broken?  If we
really need to do this and there has been trouble, a friend writes a tool
that can probably do it properly.

As a more general point, all this work really is appreciated Wookey, but I
do wonder if you're making life harder for yourself than needs be :)  I
would have thought a no-frills conversion in this case would have been
sufficient in the first instance and much less labour intensive.

One other thing that comes to mind is that with git it is possible to make
clones without cloning all the history, which might be useful in certain
circumstances.  In particular this reduces further any need to be concerned
about repository size, I think.

Have you started converting loser?  If not I'm happy to try doing that
including the CVS changesets.

Mark
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