Re: [Monotone-devel] silly idea: auto gunzip?

[Timothy Brownawell]

On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 23:57 +0100, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> I am writing my thesis, since quite a few months. It is in OpenOffice
> format, that is: zipped XML.
> And I am versioning it with monotone, of course.
> Of course each time I change a single bit in the uncompressed text, most
> of the compressed file changes.
> And each single time occours to me that versioning the uncompressed
> version would produce:
> a. much smaller xdiffs
> b. much more understandable visual diffs
> But of course changing the way a file is stored depending on his format
> is a silly idea that opens a literal Pandora's box of problems.
> And it would be better places in a wrapper anyway, if at all. Something
> that recognizes common file format, and decompress or transform then in
> the "most fundamental" state or something.

We already have {read,write}_localized_data, used for I/O of versioned
files. These currently do charset and line ending conversions, but could
reasonably be modified to call general file-munging hooks (and renamed
appropriately).

...If the munging hook for write took arguments for the revid and
fileid, it could even do things like the $Id$ expansion that has
occasionally been asked for.

Tim