Re: Binary files edited by several people

Hi Olivier,

you misunderstood me or, better, I did not express myself accurate enough :)

Binary file merging is impossible as long as the merge tool does not know about the internal structure of the binary file. This will be always the case.

What I'm saying is that since this fact IMHO it is not possible to have multiple people working on the same binary file.

The only consequence is to PREVENT people from doing this. Therefore you need a lock mechnism.

If a tool like svn claims to handle binary files correctly I assume that this is not limited to a more efficient way of storing it.

So, if nobody can tell me differently IMHO SubVersion should not claim that it can handle binary files. Being better in one feature but leaving a vital other feature away when compared with CVS does not make it superior but inferior.

I might be wrong on this, but we are in the unlucky position to have a lot of binary files here and we cannot switch to SubVersion because of the lack of a lock mechanism.

No problem for me, I can wait for the version when this is supported (I know that is on the todo list), but I do not like the aspect of "false advertising". This is a harsh phrase but what else is it?

I appreciate your comments, maybe I got something totally wrong here.

What would the best thing is that the lock feature moves a bit up on the priority list... :)

Regards,
Andre Pietsch
-----Original Message-----
From: Olivier FOURDAN [mailto:olivier.fourdan@regis-dgac.net]
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 5:22 PM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: Binary files edited by several people

Hi,

IMHO merging is just one way of resolving conflicts. Another way is to
overide changes (which make a lot more sense in the case on binaries)

The fact that you can't merge binary files doesn't mean that Subversion
doesn't handle deltas on binary files internally.

Support of binaries in Subversion is one of its big advantages over many
other SCM tools (I know of no binary merge tool anyway, but that doesn't
mean there are none)

Cheers,
Olivier.

Andre Pietsch wrote:

>Hi!
>
>How does svn handle the issue when two or more people are editing binary files at the same time and are subsequently checking in their files?
>
>I guess the user trying to check in as second will receive a conflict message.
>
>If this is so, how can the website state that svn handles binary files correctly.
>
>The correct handling for binary files would be offering a lock mechanism like cvs edit/unedit or am I getting something wrong here?
>
>Please enlighten me :)
>
>Regards,
>Andre Pietsch
>
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Received on Thu Mar 4 17:33:44 2004