Proposal: generic svn:encoding mechanism

I'd like to propose a simple, generic mechanism that happens to support
MacOS resource forks and a few other interesting possibilities:

Proposal: Standardize an svn:encoding property. If set, it specifies a
filter mechanism that will be used to convert the file on disk before it
is stored in the repository (and vice-versa). This is partially
inspired by a similar mechanism in the HTTP protocol.

Application #1: svn:encoding=binhex4

    This would invoke a "binhex4" encoder prior to commit, "binhex4"
decoder on checkout, allowing MacOS folks to store files with resource
forks.

Application #2: svn:encoding=gzip

    This would invoke a "gzip" encoder prior to commit, "gzip" decoder
on checkout. Result is a gzip-compressed file in the repository,
expanded file on disk.

This mechanism would also provide a hook for other types of extended
attribute systems on other platforms in the future.

There are a few questions to resolve with this: Does the mime-type
apply to the file on disk or the file in the repo? How do you deal with
unsupported encodings? These seem pretty mundane issues to me, with a
variety of reasonable resolutions.

Tim Kientzle
tkientzle@zinio.com

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Received on Wed Aug 3 20:17:58 2005