[André Pönitz]
> There are basically two points coming up in the discussions:
> 1. (religious) Everybody should use text everywhere.
> 2. (semi-technical) One cannot trust clients to have proper
> filter installed, so interaction with clients may fail.
3. (technical) For every compression codec, you need to have a way to
make sure the subversion client or server can recompress to the
original input. This is important for anyone who uses checksums
or digital signatures. And with many if not all compression
codecs, the exact compressed output is implementation-dependent,
even if implementations are compatible and the *uncompressed* bits
are lossless.
So this proposal only works in a homogeneous world where everyone
is using the same copy of zlib, and always uses gzip -9. I don't
think we live in that world, though for some codecs we might. For
other types of codecs, this is even dicier - would you like to
assert that you can get a bit-for-bit identical copy of a Word
document after opening and saving it, for instance? (I'd bet
serious money you won't.)
Received on Thu Dec 8 08:48:33 2005