[darcs-users] ANN: musdex

[Max Battcher]

Trent W. Buck wrote:
> Max Battcher <me at worldmaker.net> writes:
> 
>> http://blog.worldmaker.net/2010/mar/03/storing-documents-version-control-musdex/
>>
>> [...] Basically, in darcs terms: its a prehook/posthook duo that
>> pre-record extracts the contents of given zip archives (which may be
>> .docx, or .odt files for instance) into a directory structure in a
>> darcs repository (adding the files to darcs as necessary) [...]
>>
>> I'd be interested if there are any questions, and/or finding out if
>> anyone finds this an interesting tool.
> 
> Is this extensible to other blob types?  I'm doing something similar for
> sqlite, but by main force rather than a wrapper.

Actually, that is an interesting idea for an extension to my work here. 
I've thought about making the basic structure of musdex extensible, but 
didn't have the need of it in this initial iteration.

What musdex does now:

Archive.zip -> _musdex/Archive.zip/* # each file in zip its own file
_musdex/Archive.zip/* -> Archive.zip

Presumably its not too much different to do:

Sqlite.db ~> _musdex/Sqlite.db/* # each database as SQL dump
_musdex/Sqlite.db/* ~> Sqlite.db

The transformation function is obviously a bit different, but much of 
the configuration and checks for updates could be shared.

As with the zip archives you end up with a huge space utilization in 
comparison to the original binary file (particularly because SQL dumps 
can be extremely verbose), but you should gain some much nicer darcs 
patches solely to a collection of text files as a benefit...

I'll post the darcs repository for musdex in just a bit, if you want to 
play around with the code repository (although all the code can be seen 
in the tarball on PyPI, considering this is Python).

I'll consider putting some sort of extension framework back on my TODO list.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net