Re: improving subversion treatment of compressed XML/text file formats

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 17:45 -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> Subversion stores all files in the repository as differences against
> previous versions. It does not differentiate between text or binary
> files at this point. However, depending on the compression algorithm,
> compressed files don't necessarily lend themselves to efficient
> diffing, which can result in them taking more space in the repository
> over time than the uncompressed versions would have.
>

I wasn't sure about this point, but my experience is that small changes
to a document seem to produce large diffs in the compressed version
leading to a large repository.

> Note that an OpenOffice.org file is not a compressed text file, but a
> compressed directory of several text files.
>

Yes, but this shouldn't be too difficult to handle as at least the
standard linux diff command diffs directories without difficulty (say
that three times fast). I believe that subversion uses its own
algorithm, but handling directories can't be too hard. One option would
be to tar the directory into one file that would still be human
readable.

Cheers,
David

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