[MERGE REVIEW] Binary file handling

[Aaron Bentley]

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Matthieu Moy wrote:
| Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> writes:
|
|
|>Binary files are defined as files containing the NUL character (\x00) in
|>their first 1024 bytes.  Reportedly, this is the heuristic used by diff.
|>~ This does, unfortunately, mean that UTF-16 files will be treated as
|>binary.
|
|
| Perhaps it would be worth adding a way to tell bzr "this is text/this
| is binary" in the user-interface (and this means a meta-info in the
| repository)?

Martin felt that approach was too baroque, and that we should do it
this way.

It's worth mentioning that mergers should only deal with whatever *they*
consider to be text, and diff3 will fail rather spectacularly when asked
to deal with files containing NUL.  So to some extent, this mechanism
protects mergers from files they can't sensibly handle, and allowing
users to override that wouldn't be good.

Aaron
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