[darcs-devel] [issue939] wish: look "inside" gzip and tar files

[Joachim Breitner]

New submission from Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de>:

Hi,

I would like darcs to be able to look „inside“ gzip and tar files (and others
possible as well). The motivation are file formats like .odt that are zip-files
that contain plain text (here: xml) files, or formats like zipped svg as used by
inkscape. If darcs would be able to unpack these and actually record the change
of the contents as a patch, it could merge independent edits of the same
document or image, just as it could merge them when they were not wrapped.

As this is of course not always desired, this could be enabled with a flag when
adding the file first and the file be marked approriately, similar to binary
files are flagged. From then on, darcs could transparently uncompress and
compress the .gzip file when modifiying them, or treat the zip file similar to a
directory.

I have not heard of any other VCS that implements this, but I think it’s a very
useful feature that darcs could shine with.

Greetings,
Joachim

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messages: 5150
nosy: beschmi, dagit, nomeata, tommy
priority: wishlist
status: unread
title: wish: look "inside" gzip and tar files

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Darcs bug tracker <bugs at darcs.net>
<http://bugs.darcs.net/issue939>
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