[darcs-users] Windows end-of-line characters

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 12:04:39PM +1000, Peter Maxwell wrote:
> This issue has been causing me problems.  Here is what I think I know:
> 
> Windows text file lines are terminated with CR LF, unix with just LF.
> 
> Most version control software automatically (sometimes optionaly) 
> converts text files to have native EOLs, so the same file will have 
> CRLF on windows and LF on unix.  GPG does something similar, in some 
> modes.  So do email clients, web browsers etc.
> 
> darcs doesn't yet have a policy on end-of-line characters.  Current 
> behaviour is mostly to not do any such conversions.

As a matter of fact, darcs *does* have a policy on such conversions, and
that is not to do them.  This was discussed a while back, and the concensus
was that darcs shouldn't modify your files when taking them from one
platform to another.

> There is an exception: if a patch is sent directly via sendmail at any 
> point (ie: darcs send from a unix machine) the line endings will be 
> converted to those native to the target machine.  Side issue: lines 
> over 1000 characters long also get wrapped by sendmail.
>
> The solution would be to always MIME encode mailed patches.  That would 
> remove the differences in the behaviour of a mailed patch and a copied 
> patch which can lead to "Error applying patch to recorded" etc.

Hmmmm.  This definitely is a problem.  One thing on my (long) TODO list has
been to write a hex decoder to deal with patches sent via MAPI.  I believe
if you use MAPI on windows it currently does MIME encode when you darcs
send (for precisely this reason).

Another good idea would be to add a checksum to each patch bundle, so we
could catch situations where a mailer has trashed a patch.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org