DOCS Bundle format 4 aka 1.0alpha

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Aaron Bentley wrote:
> After some discussion with Robert, I'm renaming the new format to bundle
> format 4.  I've written up a document describing it which is close to
> our actual output format.
> 
> Aaron


...

Relation to merge directives
- ----------------------------
A merge directive specifies a merge command to apply and a preview of
what that
command would do.  Merge directives may contain a format-4 bundle.  The
bundle's job is to provide the data needed to perform that merge command.

It is recommended that the bundle be provided in a bzip-compressed,
mime64-encoded format, to ensure compactness and resistance to
email-transport
damage.

A preview/overview patch may be provided by the merge directive.




One quick comment here... If you base64 encode the bundle portion of the
merge directive, and still include the diff-based (human readable)
section before that. Then you are going to double base-64 encode it for
transmission over email. I don't know that it is a big deal, it just
feels a little weird. Utf-8 emails are generally base64 encoded to make
sure that no 7-bit mailers break anything. It means that your bzip2
bundle gets expanded 2 times (*1.25 each time for a total size increase
of 1.5625 over the bzip2 portion).

Just a thought. We are already doing this today, but I realized it
recently, and thought we might consider doing it differently.

Note that git 'patches' have a weird base-48 or something encoding. At
least, I came across it while looking through the hg code, since they
can generate 'git-compatible' rich-patches.

John
=:->
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