Re: [PATCH] binary patch.

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Daniel Barkalow <barkalow@iabervon.org> writes:

> On Fri, 5 May 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> But "binaryness" affects only certain operations that extract
>> the data (e.g. diff and grep) and not others (e.g. fetch).
>> Also, it makes sense to being able to retroactively mark a blob,
>> which was not marked as such originally, is a binary.  So I do
>> not think it should be recorded in the object header.
>
> Why do you think it makes sense to retroactively mark a blob with things 
> like binariness or MIME type? To the extent that the information is not 
> possible to extract from the blob contents, it seems to me to be a 
> permanent aspect of the blob. And I could see having blobs with the same 
> content but different type information (that one is a ZIP archive, while 
> this one is a OpenDocument file), and tools may care how they were 
> specified, and the user would want to be able to track how they had 
> historically been marked, if the system allows them to be marked at all.
>
> Of course, there's still the issue of how this info is generated for a new 
> blob; I think it should live in the index for tracked files and come from 
> a .gitignore-style file for new files. (For that matter, there could be a 
> .gitmetadata file, which would handle "ignore" as well as binary and 
> whatever other info you want to produce about your not-previously-tracked 
> files.)

I think Nico's solution (compromise?) is the right and most
practical one.