[darcs-devel] DARCS for Windows international development

[David Roundy]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 05:03:11PM -0700, Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 04:59:12PM -0700, David Roundy wrote:
> > On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 05:27:24PM -0700, Paul Schauble wrote:
> > > I do international software development for Windows. This means I have a
> > > bunch of source files in Unicode/UTF-16LE.
> > >  
> > > At present, DARCS does not handle this format, except as a pure binary
> > > file.
> > >  
> > > Would it be practical to add UTF-8 and UTF-16BE and LE formats with full
> > > diff/merge support?
> > > Is this something the developers would be interested in doing?
> > 
> > It would be practical, but I don't know of any developers that would have
> > time to do so.  It wouldn't even be particularly hard, I suspect, the
> > trickiness would all be in handling the line endings, since darcs doesn't
> > do anything with the contents of lines (unless you use replace, which might
> > be broken).
> 
> Convieniently, the UCS2 byte sequence for 10 contains 10.  So if darcs
> didn't refuse to linediff files containing 0, things would just work. 

That should be easy.  It does make it a little easier for people with
binary files to shoot themselves in the foot.  There's also the question of
the marking up of conflicts, which might generate crazy garbage (so it'd
need testing).
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University