[gentoo-dev] Re: [PATCH v2 08/19] ebuild-maintenance: rewrite the text on adding binary files to the tree #558642

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Patrice Clement posted on Sun, 24 Jan 2016 16:00:31 +0100 as excerpted:

> "Again you should not compress these patches because git does not play
> well binary files".
> 
> I'm not sure this statement still holds true with git. Does it?

It does.

Git is designed to be extremely efficient at distributed source version 
control, and works best with text-based sources which it can treat 
"intelligently".  Not only does it do its own text compression in the pak 
files, it's relatively dumb in terms of binary differences, being able to 
tell a binary file changed, but effectively considering it a single file 
level change while with text it does line-level tracking.

By compressing a patch or doing a tarball, you're effectively turning it 
into a single blob in terms of tracking, while as the uncompressed text-
based patch-files, git can not only track the individual files, but 
individual lines within them.  While with patch-files losing the 
individual line tracking isn't generally a huge loss (the patches tend to 
be replaced as a whole, without line-level changes within a single 
patch), losing the per-component-patch file tracking is.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman