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

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Fri Apr 15 16:02:50 UTC 2005


On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 05:50:39PM +0200, Tommy Pettersson wrote:
> 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.

Binaries are handled less efficiently in terms of space and bandwidth, but
more efficiently in that we don't bother taking diffs of binary files, and
the diff algorithm can be slow.

Another difference is that the contents of binary files aren't dumped to
the screen when you record, which is handy...

> > 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.

That's correct, no resource forks.  As I understand things, they're now
deprecated by Apple.
-- 
David Roundy




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