svnadmin dump : use deltas in dump output

Question

What does it mean to "use deltas in dump output" with svnadmin dump ?

Does this mean to only print the differences between the commits for each svn dump log?

From what I tried, it appears that this is true ; however, I wanted to confirm this as this has a fairly big impact on what I'm doing.

Answer 1

Yes, more information is in the manual :

The second useful option is --deltas. This option causes svnadmin dump to, instead of emitting full-text representations of file contents and property lists, emit only deltas of those items against their previous versions. This reduces (in some cases, drastically) the size of the dump file that svnadmin dump creates. There are, however, disadvantages to using this option—deltified dump files are more CPU-intensive to create, cannot be operated on by svndumpfilter, and tend not to compress as well as their nondeltified counterparts when using third-party tools such as gzip and bzip2.