that's a bit of a gamble, not sure I would have done that myself. It's probably ok but you never know in 40 years CVS and your code is still in use somewhere and you'll cause some people headaches :]
In this particular case, it's not that big of a deal. As I understand it, this is an in-memory format that does not outlive program execution. One can safely assume that, even if CVS still exists in 40 years, no one will be using a 40-year-old version of this program by then.
As I understand it, he needed the compression to make the code work at all in the available memory. Since this is a source code distribution, presumably it will be pretty easy to fix in thirty years if the code is still being used. (Presumably we'll all have at least 256GB RAM available in 2043...)
small remark: this will cover dates to 2050
that's a bit of a gamble, not sure I would have done that myself. It's probably ok but you never know in 40 years CVS and your code is still in use somewhere and you'll cause some people headaches :]