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

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:41:28 +0100, Bruce Stephens 
<address@hidden> said:

monotone> Almost always, you're right: text is text, and you want it with the
monotone> client's native conventions.  However, now and again (because of some
monotone> broken tool, or broken process) it does matter: some tool needs the
monotone> file with some specific line-ending convention, regardless of the
monotone> platform's convention.  Such cases are sufficiently rare, though, (or
monotone> seem so to me---there may be domains where the situation is much more
monotone> common) that it wouldn't be a disaster if they were ignored entirely.

I actually know one library that does this on Windows: OpenSSL.  For
some reason, it seems to want to read PEM files in binary mode and
requires it to have LF as line endings, something I find completely
ridiculous.  I haven't dared change that yet, though.  And there are
some arguments about what OpenSSL should do with it's S/MIME
output...

My personal feeling is that software that do not follow the local line
ending convention for text files should be spanked (I do not spank
children, but I will spank software occasionally) and get a timeout
until it has learned better manners (something I'm definitely willing
to teach it if I happen to be involved anyway :-)).

Of course, someone might declare that a certain file type (like
base64-encoded data (yes, I've had that said to me)) is binary rather
than text.  That can always be debated, but that's a different can of
worms entirely.

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/