Re: svn blame not working for files which had binary mime-type in a previous revision

Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> writes:

> OK, I agree that it might not be obvious to someone who doesn't know
> how blame actually works internally. It works by incrementally diffing
> all revisions that changed the file to figure out which revision
> contributed which line. Since a binary file doesn't have a notion
> of what a 'line' really is, this approach doesn't work for binary
> files. Neither does it work if one or more revisions contain binary
> content.

What exactly goes wrong? The current revision is text, not binary, and
the final output is the current file. No part of the binary file gets
into the final output.

Suppose I have a file that really was binary in the past, perhaps a
shell script that used to be an ELF binary. When blame reaches the
binary revision the binary data is likely to get treated as one or more
lines of text, none of which match the current text. At that point the
blame algorithm is complete. Isn't that the right answer?

I see I asked this question in the original thread but I don't see any
answer.

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