[darcs-users] Line endings opinion poll (with bonus opinion)

[Peter Strand]

Michael Conrad wrote:

> So, the poll:  There are two main camps (I think) on how lines should be
> handled:
> 1: All spacing and formatting and control characters are part of the file,
> and should not be modified by a revision control program.  If it were
> modified, it could end up with inconsistent results when copying between
> systems and diffing by hand.
> 
> 2: "ASCII Text" is a protocol which different systems speak differently.  It
> consists of lines of printable characters which are delimited by
> system-specific control characters.  A revision control system should use
> whatever notion of "text" the host operating system uses, and translate
> whenever data comes or goes from the system.

> So, whats everyone's opinion? 

#2 as default with support for #1.
(I can live with "#1 with support for #2" as well)

Usually it's preferably to use the system-specific format of text-files,
and I think that it is the revision control system's job to do the 
conversion. However, it is sometimes nice to be able use an alternative
format, for example when sharing a filesystem between unix and windows
I usually use unix-encoding for all files.


I have an almost-finished patch to darcs which adds (primitive) support
for windows newlines when reading and writing text files. It basically 
just adds a --convert-newlines option to get and then keeps track of the
format for subsequent operations..
I don't know if that is a good interface..?



/Peter