[darcs-users] Clever idea for storing binaries, comments?

[Anselm R. Garbe]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 10:31:40AM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> My prefered solution is that one can provide text<->binary converters for
> some binary file types. That is you say darcs which program to use to
> convert a specific file type to a text representation, then darcs uses
> this representation for recording. For reverting it uses the text->binary
> converter. I think there are a lot of binary file formats which could be
> replaced by text formats. Such converters would simplify the work with any
> other text based tool, such as text editors, grep, sed, cvs and so on. 

The main problem is, that diff generation of binaries
(regardless if you use a base64 encoding or something else)
don't brings noticable profits in the general case, because you'll
replace the binary after an update with nearly a complete new diffed
binary (of at least the same size as before) with next change.
Changing some colors in an image for example results in a
complete new image file with a complete new binary format
(mostly).

Thus revision control systems don't diff binaries in any way. As
I know of subversion, they use a general purpose delta which
don't differentiates between text or binarey, it just works on
streams. But I don't think that this delta provides any profits
regarding to save storage usage.

Regards,
-- 
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361