Re: [Gnu-arch-users] DARCS

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Zack" == Zack Brown <address@hidden> writes:

    Zack> Darcs is really cool. One thing you don't mention in your
    Zack> post is that darcs supports arbitrary characters in
    Zack> filenames, which arch doesn't do (and apparently will
    Zack> not). That's a big deal.

Please don't abuse the word "support" that way.  Say "permit."
I really can't imagine that DARCS truly supports use of arbitrary
characters in file names.  Permitting it is just a way of saying
"we're not serious about the business of protecting your data yet."
(Please tell me I'm wrong; if the DARCS developers have actually
thought about these issues, then we can probably use some of their
techniques in X?Emacs.)

I have to applaud Tom for biting the bullet and refusing to permit
what he is not ready to support.

In this context, "support" means _ensuring_ that use of those names in
file contents is also properly adjusted.  This is absolutely sine qua
non for projects under internationally distributed development.  You
do not need to use multiple languages to corrupt data; all you need
is multiple character sets, and the simultaneous existence of UTF-8
and ISO-8859 means that all Europeans are vulnerable.

Note that this kind of corruption is really nasty: nobody will recover
from it the way Karel Gardas and MICO recovered from loss of their
primary repository---all copies (backups, mirrors) will be corrupt, too.


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