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

[Adam Logghe]

Graydon,

I switch between Windows and Linux frequently, and most of the people
that I work with can figure out what to do.

I would like the default to be all binary with a flag for people that
want magic guessing behaviour.

Looking forward to ssh + changeset inclusion.

Thanks again,

Adam

graydon hoare wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:41:28 +0100, Bruce Stephens
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>> I'm not sure why we would need to keep track of anything but the
>>> local line-ending.  Really.  Text is text.  Text is a vector of
>>> lines, basically.  Line ending isn't really something that should be
>>> considered part of the text per se.
>>
>>
>> Almost always, you're right: text is text, and you want it with the
>> client's native conventions.  However, now and again (because of some
>> broken tool, or broken process) it does matter: some tool needs the
>> file with some specific line-ending convention, regardless of the
>> platform's convention.  Such cases are sufficiently rare, though, (or
>> seem so to me---there may be domains where the situation is much more
>> common) that it wouldn't be a disaster if they were ignored entirely.
>
>
> I'm afraid I can't concur with this picture of text, though it's 
appealing;
> there are lots of files which "are text" and which don't do what you'd
> like.
> for this discussion there are two important categories:
>
>  1. those which treat any byte 0x0a as LF and 0x0d as CR
>     (ISO-8859-x, GB, KOI, EUC, UTF-8)
>
>  2. those which do not
>     (ISO-2022-x, EBCDIC, UTF-16, UCS-4)
>
> what we're discussing has implications at the character set and encoding
> level, and I'm not comfortable forcing users to store their "text" 
files as
> a particular character set, because such conversions can be lossy and
> unwanted.
>
> iow, it is not enough to say "since most users use text files most of the
> time, we should freely munge EOLs unless users say --type=binary"; what
> you are actualy saying is that "since most users use text type #1 files
> most of the time, we should freely munge EOLs unless users say
> --type=binary". I find that .. plausible .. but a bit less convincing.
>
> when we last discussed this, iirc people clearly said they wanted to
> retain control of the issue. so it needs to be possible for a particular
> user to precisely specify which conversions are done on which charsets,
> and when to do none at all. a hook needs to be involved.
>
> that said, if the hook interprets things it finds in .mt-attrs, and a
> default hook interprets a "binary" flag as meaning no-conversion, and
> converts everything else, then it may be possible to make user-friendly
> in the general case without losing precision in the special case.
>
> (I should point out that while it sounds nice on paper, you cannot
>  reliably infer text-ness or particular charset encoding; you can infer
>  when something is *definitely* outside UTF-8 or ASCII, but not the other
>  way)
>
> -graydon
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Monotone-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-deve
> l