Re: improving subversion treatment of compressed XML/text file formats

Hi,

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 18:28 +0200, Benjamin Smith-Mannschott wrote:
> SVN Repo Space Efficiency when Edited often:
>
> format space efficiency merge-friendlyness
> ============= ================ ==================
> plain text very good very good
> html very good good
> flat ODT: good poor [1]
> msword doc acceptable impossible [2]
> msword docx poor impossible [2]
> ODT poor impossible [2]
> ---------------------------------------------------
> [1] This format isn't widely supported (a pitty, really).
> [2] SVN will not and should not attempt to merge these
> formats as they are not textual. Microsoft-word and
> OpenOffice do contain features allowing a user to
> perform merges independently of svn within the tool,
> it's just that they'd have to do this "by hand" for
> every merge conflict.
> ===================================================
>
> // Ben
>

Just one question about merging with ODT-like documents: not being able
to merge would leave things no worse than binary docs, right? By this I
mean that SVN does not try to merge changes in binaries currently. So
one could still get advantages in space by doing some sort of
uncompress-diff process as I previously suggested, but one would just be
left without the possibility of merging. Is this correct?

Also, why is html better at merging than flat ODT? I would imagine that
any XML-like format would have problems with blind merging.

If anyone has thoughts on implementing this super-compressed text
diffing with appropriate hooks somehow, I would love to hear them. It
doesn't sound that difficult to do the uncompress, tar, diff process,
but doing it right is probably out of my league.

I also wonder if bazaar or some other cms has tried to tackle this
problem?

Cheers,
David

>

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