Re: CVS and Binaries

[Paul Sander]

The uuencode format is an example of an ASCII-but-unmergeable format.
In other words, after you've performed a merge between two or three
uuencoded files, the output will likely be unrecognizable by the
uudecode program.

You're better off using something that's better suited to storing
binaries.  You can use CVS if you're dead set on using it, but you'll
want to modify it.  On September 16, 2001, I posted to this group
a demonstration of one way to do this by swapping out CVS' built-in
diff3-based merge algorithm with an extensible mechanism.  If you're
interested in that work, look for the following message ID in an
archive of this mailing list.

address@hidden



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>Ok its clear, that CVS is not for merging binaries.. But can I, theoretically,
>make my own wrapper which converts the binary into some sort of 
>mergeable text (uuencode for example) which encodes binary before
>it gets into repository, and reverts ir back when file is checked out?
>I know it will take up more space, but less than keeping exact copy
>of each binary version. Sometimes we need  to keep binaries in CVS.
>I'm not into details how the CVS internals work, but I'd like to.

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