On 27.10.2014 18:45, Ben Reser wrote: > On 10/26/14 11:35 AM, Branko Čibej wrote: >> The fact that the svn:mime-type property is usable in any way for >> serving content from the repository is more or less an accident; it's >> definitely not a design goal. What you propose would have zero benefit >> for Subversion as a version control system but less than trivial >> maintenance costs, so it's not likely to ever happen. > I agree splitting up well known parameters of the Internet Media Type into > standard "svn:" namespace properties seems not terribly useful to me. > > I don't think the choice of storing a mime-type rather than just a boolean for > binary data vs not-binary is a happy accident. Pretty sure we stored a > mime-type because we figured it would be useful for other things than just > distinguishing binary types. But as I recall you're the one that came up with > the svn:mime-type property in the first place. So maybe you have a better > recollection than I do about this.
Frankly, IIRC I had rather naïve expectations about the usefulness of MIME-type for detecting "binaryness". Or, more precisely, the ability to diff/merge. One of the considerations at the time was also to have the ability to add diff/merge handlers for content other than line-based plain text (XML merge was probably at the top of the list at the time). Turns out we've never actually bothered doing that (yet). -- Brane
