We all know about tools, third-party or built-in in the OS, for processing compressed files in the form of folders. But does anyone know how to do the opposite: trick the OS into thinking that the standard folder containing some files is actually a zipped file? Solutions for Windows, Linux, and Mac are being sought (although I understand that no solution will work on all of these platforms).
The context of the question is to obtain source code version control systems, such as SVN, Git, or Mercurial, to more efficiently store differences between versions of documents that are actually compressed folders (containing various XML files, some metadata and a thumbnail or two), for example, ODT and docx.
I already know about Zipdoc and similar utilities that use the Git and Mercurial encode / decode bindings to convert data to and from the repository. This is a great solution to the problem, but I found that I want to view the repository containing the contents of the uncompressed folder in the document and separately distinguish the files in it.
This means that uncompressed content should be added to the repository, not the tar'd or zipped-without-compression version of the document. This, in turn, means that checking from the repository creates an uncompressed folder full of files that represent the document. Hence my original question.
The mythical product that I present will detect a folder whose name contains the “registered” extension (for example, “docx”), and then “re-mount” it as a compressed file with the same name.
Alternatively, does anyone know how to use Git / Mercurial encode / decode hooks to achieve this dream?
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