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

Samuel A. Falvo II sam.falvo at falvotech.com
Sat Oct 30 00:23:16 UTC 2004


On Friday 29 October 2004 09:08 am, Kevin Ollivier wrote:
> >> 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?

There are currently three methods of encoding ASCII text.  DOS, Unix, and 
MacOS Classic.  I don't know if MacOS X uses Unix-style line endings or 
MacOS-style endings.  Windows systems are schitzophrenic between Unix 
and DOS styles in many cases, but seems to prefer DOS over Unix by a 
relatively small margin.

This means that darcs would have to be able to somehow detect or store as 
metadata which kind of system is in use when a file is initially checked 
in, and remember to convert to and from that format as appropriate.

In the interest of making things easier for darcs, I suggest having a 
*common* form in which *all* text files take inside the repository, 
regardless of which platform darcs is running on.  This will make 
transferring repositorities between platforms easier.  I suggest the 
text transmission layout as used by RFC822, for example.  Basically, 
this is DOS-style, and is the original style recommended by ASCII (heh, 
the ONLY standard Microsoft has adopted, it seems).  That is, lines end 
with CR/LF.

For Darcs running on Unix or MacOS platforms, then, knowing that a file 
is plain ASCII, it can convert between its native format and the 
standard format effortlessly, without having to worry who the intended 
target is.  This is a case of supporting N systems through N conversion 
routines, instead of N*N-1.

Just my opinion on the subject.  I otherwise don't care much.  :)  Thanks 
for reading.





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