handling zip files

[Lester Caine]

Franklin Siler wrote:
>> >IMHO the one type of binary file that it almost never makes sense to track is a .zip file - track the contents and generate the .zip file on the fly either using pythons zipfile module or using one of the command line zip file tools.
> This is a very pure but ultimately unhelpful mode of thinking.  The reality is that file handlers for non-text files would be incredibly useful: I would LOVE if there was easy support for sqlite files, for example.  I’m working on unmarshaling them to text, compare with vimdiff, and merge back to binary when finished.
>    I think there are many use cases where it makes perfect sense to track other binaries, including .zip and associated formats, such as Open Documents, in version control.
>    I hear the frequent refrain “use an artifact repo!”, but I have yet to see one that doesn’t suck (tm).

I've used BeyondCompare as my comparison tool since before it existed on Linux. 
It has always had a growing number of filters to process 'binary' files and 
originally one could edit windows resource files which was even difficult on the 
real development tools.

The one thing that I am currently missing is a GOOD way of managing and 
searching .odt files with their built in compression. Pulling these apart to 
provided searchable and comparable documents in a repository would be a useful 
plus. Again BC partially fills the gap but has a few holes.

The neat thing with BeyondCompare is that the 'directory' you are comparing can 
be a zip file, and so comparing 15 year old versions of todays code is simple 
and while I have created Hg repo's of the codebase by scanning each version in 
the archives, it's a lot quicker simply to access a distribution zip than 'find' 
a particular build in the repo history. Both have their places, so saying 'it 
never makes sense' only applies to a particular point of view! Managing the 
actually distributed zip can flag problems that rebuilding on the fly may well hide.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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