[Monotone-devel] Re: Looking at the code affected in bug 9752 leaves a weird taste...

[Bruce Stephens]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> This takes me back to get_linesep_conv.  Why, exactly, whould it be
> able to specify what the line separator should be in the database?
> Why isn't get_system_linesep enough, especially if it can be given a
> file name as argument?

I'm not sure whether this is an answer to that question, exactly, but
there are cases where files which are basically text files ought to
have specific (non-system) line-endings.  That could be done in lua
hooks, I suppose, but having it in the database seems like the right
thing to do.  (If it's in a hook, then everyone has to be sure to have
an equivalent hook, which is asking for trouble.)

The only concrete example I can think of are some kinds of file that
Visual Studio uses, which we had in CVS.  Our build process involved
checking everything out on Unix, and then building on several systems,
including Windows.  So on Windows, these .dsp (or whatever) files
ended up with the wrong line-endings, unless we told CVS to store them
as binary.  (That's not such a good example, obviously, since the
system line-endings would have been correct; it's just that we were
mixing systems confusingly.  However, it wouldn't be surprising if
there were files which really did need to have some line ending
convention different to the normal system default on some system.)