On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 20:54, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> Alessandro Polverini <polverini@nibbles.it> writes:
>
> > So, I'm wondering: would it be possible to implement this behaviour in
> > svn, when checking in files that have a certain property set:
> > - gunzip the file
> > - diff it with the previous (gunzipped) file
> > - store differences (diff works well enough with xml files)
>
> Internally, Subversion uses a binary diff algorithm to express all
> file differences, regardless of whether a file contains text or binary
> data. So when you store successive versions of a binary file in a
> Subversion repository, you *are* getting differential (compressed)
> storage. (CVS, because it uses RCS, has to store the entire binary
> file over and over.)
>
> So in this sense, Subversion is already doing what you wish.
Not really.
What I mean is: a single byte difference in a text file could
(potentially) lead to a much different compressed file, so the
"difference between differences" could be very high.
Also, and this is the most important thing in my advice, by diffing the
uncompressed files, we can :
- understand (real) differences between OpenOffice files (for example in
a text document) instead of having simply two completely unrelated
binary files (two different revisions).
- enable (sometimes) merges, and hence, the ability to put under svn
files that normally we can't because of the missing of "lock"
functionality.
Greetings,
Alex
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Received on Mon Feb 24 19:46:57 2003