[OT] VCS for non-text (was Development tools and practices for Pythonistas)

[Martin Schöön]

On 2011-04-30, Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:
> On 04/30/2011 04:15 AM, Martin Schöön wrote:
>> You guys are very code focused, which is natural given where we are.
>>
>> Having absorbed what I have seen here, looked a little at Mercurial,
>> read a little on the webs of Fossil and Bazaar I start to think there
>> is great merit in all this VCS stuff for other types of projects.
>>
>> At work my projects contain very little coding (some Python, some
>> matlab/scilab perhaps) but a fair amount of CAD/CAE, written
>> reports, presentations (OpenOffice and that other Office),
>> spread sheets etc etc. A mixture of ascii-files and various
>> proprietary formats most of which is stored in binary form.
>> Some of the CAE-work generate pretty big files stored
>> in dynamically created subdirectories.
>
> For non-text blobs, it takes a little bit of insight to get the 
> most out of them.  For OpenDocument (Open/Libre Office 
> documents), they're zipped files containing text/XML which can be 
> diff'ed with more meaning.  Usually there are custom filters for 
> git[1], Mercurial[2] and Bazaar[3] which will unpack the zipped 
> file contents before committing and give you more sensible diffs. 
>   Likewise, for images (gif/jpg/tiff/raw/etc), there are 
> particular image-diff programs which make it easier to tell what 
> happened, as the textual diff of binary files is pretty useless. 
>   However some images (such as .svg files) are XML/text inside, 
> and diff pretty nicely without extra effort.
>
> I can't speak to CAD/CAE, but it would have to be addressed on a 
> per-format basis in your given VCS.  That said, you *can* store 
> the binary blobs in each, it's just not as useful without 
> meaningful comparisons.
>
> -tkc
>
> [1]
> http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/9/15/3305014
>
> [2]
> http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HandlingOpenDocumentFiles
>
> [3]
> http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/plugins/en/oodiff.html
>
All very useful information. Thank you for that Tim.

/Martin