[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: Subversion and binary files

From: Thomas Scheffler <thomas.scheffler_at_uni-jena.de>
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 16:05:29 +0100

Am Freitag, 1. Februar 2008 schrieb John Peacock:
> Thomas Scheffler wrote:
> > As we have several of them in our repository it gets quiet anyoing, when
> > you use some tools like viewvc which do not display "svn blame" outputs
> > or svnnotify which refuses to print out the diffs (because svnlook is
> > used).
>
> Technically, speaking, XML files cannot always be treated as plain text
> files (since not all XML documents have strictly ordered contents).

They should be. You cannot expect that arbitrary binary data can be put in an
XML file. They are mostly base64 encoded and wrapped in CDATA blocks. Diffing
those blocks can be long as well as diffing any large text documents.

> > What can I do to tell subversion that xml files are text files?
>
> Remove the 'svn:mime-type' from the files; anything with a mime-type of
> "application/*" is considered binary. Then use the --diff-cmd and
> --extensions command line arguments to call your favorite XML diff
> program (you can easily write some wrapper scripts that automate this to
> a large extent).

Removing the "svn:mime-type" is just not sufficient as this property is just
evaluated once when the file is first added or imported to the repository. So
removing or setting "text/*" or so will not help as the file stays "binary".
I rely on tools that use "svnlook diff". So I need a solution where I can
switch files into text mode after they are inserted. Where is that
information stored? I am using the FSFS backend.

Greets

Thomas

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-02-01 16:23:40 CET

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.