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POCan git treat zip files as directories and files inside the zip as blobs?
 

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    <p><strong>The scenario</strong></p> <p>Imagine I am forced to work with some of my files always stored inside <code>.zip</code> files. Some of the files inside the zip are small text files and change often, while others are larger but luckily rather static (e.g. images).</p> <p>If I want to place these zip files inside a <code>git</code> repository, each zip is treated as a blob, so whenever I commit the repository grows by the size of the zip file... even if only one small text file inside changed!</p> <p><strong>Why this is realistic</strong></p> <p>MS Word 2007/2010 <code>.docx</code> and Excel <code>.xlsx</code> files are ZIP files...</p> <p><strong>What I want</strong></p> <p>Is there, by any chance, a way to tell <code>git</code> to not treat zips as files, but rather as directories and treat their contents as files?</p> <p><strong>The advantages</strong></p> <ul> <li>much smaller repo size, i.e. quicker transfer/backup</li> <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4704873/display-changes-with-git-to-zips">Display changes with Git to zip's</a> would automagically work</li> </ul> <p><em>But it couldn't work, you say?</em></p> <p>I realize that without extra metadata this would lead to some amount of ambiguity: on a <code>git checkout</code> git would have to decide whether to create <code>foo.zip/bar.txt</code> as a file in a regular directory or a zip file. However this could be solved through config options, I would think.</p> <p><strong>Two ideas how it could be done</strong> (if it doesn't exist yet)</p> <ul> <li>using a library such as <code>minizip</code> or <code>IO::Compress::Zip</code> inside git</li> <li>somehow adding a filesystem layer such that git actually sees zip files as directories to start with</li> </ul>
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    1. USJonas Heidelberg
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    1. COThe scenario with `.docx` files makes sense, but in many other cases you might want to consider tracking the individual files normally with git and only *building* the resulting `.zip` using an appropriate build tool like `make`.
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    2. COConsidering that two zip files that look different to each other can hold the exact same data (for example a text file zipped two times with two different compression levels), this becomes much trickier. While it is easy to represent the diff between the two versions of the unzipped files with little information, I guess representing the diff between the two versions of the archive (which is essentially what git has to do) with about as little information would be non-trivial.
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