Re: Management of opendocument (openoffice.org) files in git

Following up on the discussion about tracking oo files I conducted a minimalistic test. I simulated tracking an oo spreadsheat, where from one version to the next only a few cells would be entered in an existing spreadsheet. These are the sizes of the individual files:

48K 0.ods 48K 1.ods 60K 2.ods 60K 3.ods 56K 4.ods 64K 5.ods 68K 6.ods 64K 7.ods 64K 8.ods 68K 9.ods 600K total

I then tracked this in three different ways, each in a fresh repo:

"packed": copy $i.ods to t.ods as is, git add t.ods and commit. "unpacked": use the unzipped contents of $i.ods instead. "rezip": use the rezipped version (compression 0, using Sergio's script). "oofilter": use clean/smudge filters (calling Sergio's rezip)

Here are the resulting sizes: first ".git/objects" as is, then after repacking -adf, finally the total size of .git + the work tree (i.e. the last revision).

packed 708K .git/objects 492K .git/objects 692K .git + wt

unpacked 1,3M .git/objects 144K .git/objects 1,5M .git + wt

rezip 992K .git/objects 148K .git/objects 1,4M .git + wt

oofilter 984K .git/objects 148K .git/objects 352K .git + wt

Unsurprisingly, the total size is dominated by the work tree size if you
 have few revisions. (Also, templates and such contribute.)
Note that git log --stat will report the sizes of packed files in the
first case, but the sizes of unpacked files in all other cases. In
particular, it reports a different size for the  HEAD revision than you
have in a HEAD checkout.

I tried rewriting "packed" after configuring the filters: filter-branch refuses to work with a dirty work-tree, even after "checkout -f HEAD" and "reset --hard". It seems that git status is permanently confused here. (Has anyone successfully rewritten existing oo files?)

I'm not sure about the lessons, but I wanted to share the numbers anyways. I think this (your script and its usage) is heading in a useful direction and should maybe made more known, if not made easier from the git side. Also I'm still looking for a good (deterministic) pdf recompressor.

Michael

git version 1.6.0.2.426.g2cfa6