Re: Autoexpanding ZIP archives?

A postscript. If you really want subversion to be able to store
deflate files efficiently, I think you really want to push for the
'gzip --rsyncable'[*] variant of the codec to be more widely adopted.
It costs about 1% of compression but helps to ensure that changed bits
in the uncompressed input stream only propagate so far before the
output reconverges.

[*] This is a patch to gzip which has been in Debian for almost 3 years
    now but I don't think it's been applied elsewhere.
    http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/gzip.rsync.patch

Thus anything which uses binary differencing, be it subversion, rsync
or xdiff, will benefit from the gzip --rsyncable codec. I don't know
whether the patch has been ported to zlib, or if so, what the zlib
maintainers think of it. But I think that's where you need to be
focusing your energies.