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Re: How to disable Binary Diffs

From: fj <fj_at_effjay.com>
Date: 2007-07-25 20:29:37 CEST

Just so you know, what you've mentioned re binaries depends on the tool.
At least one major commercial tool I'm aware of (I was the team SCM
authority and the sysadmin for it for 5+ years) permitted configuring
the nature of storage down to the individual file level, so the OP's
question is quite valid. As you indicate, delta compression
selectability is a feature SVN does not have. I apologize if I've
misinterpreted your response, but it seemed to me you were somewhat
implying that diffing all files "a la" SVN was **the** desirable way for
such a tool to be.

Quoted from the manual of the other, commercial tool I referred to:

    "You can change all the revisions stored in the vault for a specific
    file from one type of storage and compression to another. The two
    types of storage are forward delta which is recommended for text
    files and full revision storage which is recommended for binary
    files and text files (like .rtf files) that can change so much that
    the delta can be as large as the file itself."

At the organization where we were using this tool, we had our
respository set up to diff text files and to not diff binaries. This
worked well for us as we stored all project artifacts together, so each
project typically contained many binaries such as MS Office documents as
well as text files. This treatment for binaries was more robust than
diffing them would have been, at least in our subjective judgement, and
it most likely improved the system's responsiveness at the client UI for
binaries.

Given all this, FWIW, the OP's question was entirely reasonable.

Regards,
FJ

Erik Huelsmann wrote:
> On 7/25/07, Torsten Krah <tkrah@fachschaft.imn.htwk-leipzig.de> wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> Search the archive but did not found anything according binary diffs.
>> Since i've upgraded to subversion from 1.2 to 1.4 checking in pdf
>> binaries does result in a diff of them - this does really take time for
>> big files and is not necessary.
>> Where can i disable this - i don't want that binaries are diffed, its a
>> little bit useless.
>
> Are you sure you're using the right tool? There's no way to turn off
> binary diff, because Subversion - at the repository level - doesn't
> distinguish between 'binary' and 'non-binary' files (aren't computers
> still binary machines these days ? :-)
>
> bye,
>
> Erik.
>
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Received on Wed Jul 25 20:28:38 2007

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