How can I preserve EBCDIC in Subversion

Question

We're using Subversion version control and we need to save there files with IBM iSeries encoding (EBCDIC). What is the best way to do it?

Answer 1

It sounds like you want Subversion to simply maintain them without normalising the content, i.e. to treat them as binary. For EBCDIC, it may detect this already. But to be sure, you should set the svn:mime-type property on them:

svn propset svn:mime-type application/octet-stream myebcdicfiles...

"application/octet-stream" is a generic binary data type that you can use if you don't have a more suitable one. Types beginning with "text/" are identified by Subversion as text: this means they may be subject to EOL normalisation (among other things). This can be really helpful for text files, but pretty destructive to binaries ;-).

See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.advanced.props.file-portability.html for more info.