[dspillett]

Also, some source files that could otherwise be treated as text⁰ end up effectively being binary blobs because tools don't write them in a stable order, which makes tracking small changes difficult because you can't see that they actually are small changes. A number of XML formats¹, and sometimes JSON & others, have this issue too.

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[0] for the purposes of change tracking and merging

[1] Stares aggressively at SSIS for its nasty package file format² and habit of saving parts of it in different orders apparently randomly so updating the text of an annotation can completely rearrange the saved file

[2] far from the only crime committed by SSIS I know, but one occasionally irritating enough to mention

[pabs3]

Could you use git pre-commit hooks or something similar to transform the files by deterministically sorting the items at each level?

Diffoscope does something similar, diff sorted stuff first, then if there are no changes, then report that, and show the unsorted diffs.

https://diffoscope.org/ https://try.diffoscope.org/

[dspillett]

> Could you use git pre-commit hooks

Possibly, though I might be concerned that the format has ordering oddities that it is unexpectedly sensitive to. Unlikely, but given how many other oddities DTS/SSIS has collected over the years I'd not be surprised!

Also, we weren't using Git in DayJob at the time we were actively developing with SSIS (maybe VSTS had an equivalent we could have used?), and we are now acting to remove the last vestiges of it from our workflows rather than spending time making it work better with them!

[Digit-Al]

OMG! Please don't remind me about trying to source control SSIS. One tiny change cascades into 1000 lines of source being different. Total nightmare.