Re: Working with zip files

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

David Lang <david@lang.hm> writes:

> you should be able to use clean/smudge to have git store the files
> uncompressed, which will help a lot.
>
> I think there's a way to tell it to do a xml aware diff/patch, but I
> don't remember how.

I do not know about "patch" (in the sense of "git apply"), but "git
diff" (and "git log -p") can take advantage of the clean/smudge
mechanism.  I used to deal with a file format that is gzipped xml so
my clean filter was "gzip -dc" while the smudge was "gzip -cn".
Essentially, this stors the xml before compression in the repository
so blobs delta well with each other and also the revisions are
made textually diff-able.

Nikolaus's case has one extra layer of complexity in that the "file"
is actually an archive of multiple files.  The clean/smudge pair he
writes need to be a filter that flattens the archive into a single
human-readable text byte stream and its reverse.