Diff and merge of archives - proposal

[jbowtie at amathaine.com]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Martin (gzlist) <gzlist at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> My thought was why not store the uncompressed archive contents in the
> repo, using pristine tar style hacks to reproduce the original archive
> as needed? Versioning the content and a small hunk of archive metadata
> would be better for bzr and is along the lines of Martin Pool's
> thoughts on content filtering. Would mean existing binary blobs
> wouldn't magically grow nice diff and merge behaviour, but saves repo
> bloat from blob changes.
>

That *could* be viable, maybe. I think I'd need to work through some
use cases to convince myself that it's worth the potentital tradeoffs.
Imagine versioning a DVD .iso - would you really want to create that
on the fly?  Personally I'd rather investigate fixing large file
handling via librsync, then repo bloat is less of a problem.