Diff and merge of archives - proposal

[John Arbash Meinel]

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...
> If an archive has changed, the contents will be decompressed and
> diffed (note that the contained files and folders will not have their
> own file-ids, so renames will not be detected!).

Note that if someone is versioning a 'tar.gz' file, often they need the
exact binary content. As an example, debian packages build from a tar.gz
file. However they use a sha/md5sum to make sure that the tarball is
valid. But they use the shasum of the compressed content. Because of
this, there have been a lot of hacks (pristine-tar), because gzip is not
deterministic.

(At the least, it includes timestamp info in the metadata, but you also
have lots of flags and tweaks, such that two people probably won't get
the same content.)

And if they *don't* need the binary blob to be exact, then why do they
need to version it as a binary blob?

Just a thought,
John
=:->
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