RE: binary files bad idea? why?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 16:09:16 (-0400), Eric Gorr wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: binary files bad idea? why?
>
> So, I took two very different binary files (well a mix of binary and 
> text files in a special folder under MacOSX called a NIB) and 
> binhexed them. I then did:
> 
>    diff -u filea.hqx fileb.hqx > difference.txt
> 
> I then did:
> 
>    patch filea.hqx difference.txt
> 
> and the resulting file was equivalent to fileb.hqx.

Well I should hope so -- you were working with plain text files and
without encountering any conflicting changes.

> So, I'm sorry...what can go wrong here?

You're not looking at the whole picture.

It is literally _impossible_ to manually resolve (with any degree of
correctness) any three way merge with conflicts in any ``binary'' file,
regardless of whether it has been encoded as text or not.

CVS is a "_CONCURRENT_ Versioning System" -- which in general means you
_must_ expect conflicts in a number of scenarios.

Why is it so damn hard for everyone to keep this simple fact in mind?

(Even without concurrency there's still the issue of merging changes
between branches.)

(Yes conflicts can be ``resolved'' by choosing one or the other, but
that's a special case, and a hack, not the general case.)

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>          Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>