Question

For background on my question: svn won’t diff a file it thinks is binary

$ svn diff data/assets/site/ir_gallery/images.kml
Index: data/assets/site/ir_gallery/images.kml
===================================================================
Cannot display: file marked as a binary type.
svn:mime-type = application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml

A recent stack overflow answer ( svn diff: file marked as binary type ) showed you can force a mime type:

$ svn propset svn:mime-type 'text/plain' data/assets/site/ir_gallery/images.kml
property 'svn:mime-type' set on 'data/assets/site/ir_gallery/images.kml'

Note that prior answer is incomplete… you also have to:

$ svn commit

---

Now my new question is: can I set a default, so all future “vnd.google-earth.kml+xml” files are treated as text by svn? The redbook appears silent on this topic: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.2/svn.advanced.props.html saying only:

...if a file's svn:mime-type property is set to a non-text MIME type
(generally, something that doesn't begin with text/, though there are
exceptions) then...

What exceptions? Are these exceptions baked into the svn code, or accessible?

Answer 1

The answer depends on the svn client that you are using. In the official svn client, the option you are looking for is Automatic Property Setting. The tl;dr version is you need to update your user or system config, set the enable-auto-props setting to yes in the miscellany section, and create a new section called auto-props which defines the patterns you want to match and the properties you are looking to set.

For your example of kml files:

### Section for configuring miscelleneous Subversion options.
[miscellany]
enable-auto-props = yes

[auto-props]
*.kml = svn:mime-type=text/plain;svn:eol-style=native

This will ensure that when you add a .kml file to your repository, it will have a mime-type of text/plain and will use line endings native to the platform of the client.