Filter for uncompressed storage of zipped document formats like docx (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3298525/version-control-for-docx-and-pdf)

[Didly]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Martin Geisler <mg at aragost.com> wrote:
> Andreas Gobell <andreasgobell at gmx.de> writes:
>
>> Dear Mercurial team,
>>
>> I am setting up Mercurial as my Version Control System. In my case it
>> is not only meant to manage source code but also Microsoft Word
>> documents in the docx format and some binary files.
>>
>> I already wrote some scripts to handle diffing and merging of docx
>> files in Word. Another goal was to improve the delta compression in
>> the repository. To achieve this I first had tried putting directories
>> containing the extracted docx contents under version control. This
>> worked fine for the repository but the usage was cumbersome because of
>> the necessary conversion between the directories and the docx files. I
>> then stumbled upon the thread
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3298525/version-control-for-docx-and-pdf
>> where Martin Geisler mentions Mercurial's Filter System. This seemed a
>> good solution as it is completely transparent to the user.
>>
>> As Martin stated that he is interested in a solution to this problem
>> and I haven't found an extension on the internet I am sending the
>> filter extension that I've written. I've done some tests and compared
>> the space required for storing standard compressed docx files, docx
>> with no compression created manually before a commit and docx
>> processed by my filter and the results show clear space savings for
>> the filter version (and of course the manually uncompressed docx). I
>> also tested odt files created in LibreOffice with the filter and they
>> work as well.
>>
>> I am new to Mercurial and I haven't written Python for a few years so
>> I am would be very glad to hear about improvements and comments.
>
> Great work, the extension looks good!
>
> You should definitely publish it somewhere more permanently: put it in a
> public repository (create one on bitbucket.org or code.google.com if you
> don't have one already) and create a wiki page for it:
>
>  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/DoczipExtension?action=edit&template=ExtensionTemplate
>
> Then add a link to the new page here:
>
>  http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UsingExtensions
>
> Also, send this to the TortoiseHg guys -- maybe Steve will bundle the
> extension with TortoiseHg since it seems particularly useful in
> Word-heavy (e.g., Windows) environments.
>
> --
> Martin Geisler
>

Please do send it (you can send an email to thg-dev at googlegroups.com).
I think this would be really useful for a lot of users!

Does your filter work for regular zip files too?

BTW, how does mercurial's storage compression compare to the zip
format compression of text files?

Angel