[darcs-users] A questions about binary files and resources

Tommy Pettersson ptp at lysator.liu.se
Fri Apr 15 15:50:39 UTC 2005


On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 04:05:29PM +0200, Andreas Känner wrote:
> I'm fairly new to version control and especially to darcs. So I wonder why  
> I need _darcs/prefs/binaries ? Is the information in this file needed by  
> darcs in order to speed up some computations or is there another reason?  
> Won't binary files be versioned unless they match a pattern in this list?

Binary files are handled less efficient by darcs, but changes
to them would look pretty funny if they were treated as text
files, so you will want binary files to be treated as binary
files anyway.

A file is treated as binary if its name matches anything in
_darcs/prefs/binaries, or if it contains a null char or a
ctrl-z char.

If you remove _darcs/prefs/binaries darcs will act as if
the file contains no patterns, but many binary files will be
detected anyway because they often contain a null char.


> I want to use darcs on Mac OS X and I wonder if darcs preserves the  
> resource fork of files? The HFS+ filesystem supports multiple data streams  
> for one file. The resource fork (data stream) has been used to store  
> metadata in the past. Most newer software does not use it, but there are  
> some components of the operating system which still needs them.

I'll pass on this question, but I'm pretty sure darcs doesn't
know anything about resource forks.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>




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