[darcs-users] Controlling binary treatment

[Mike Gunter]

Darcs is deciding that a couple of my text files should be treated as
binaries.  It is working as designed here -- both files do indeed
contain the '\0' has_funky_char looks for.  I don't see how the code
I'm looking at (from Debian's darcs-1.0.2+1.0.3rc1) allows a
workaround.  Is there one that I've missed?  Has the source changed to
allow a workaround?

Implementing a mechanism to control whether a file is to be considered
*not* binary notwithstanding the presence of suspicious characters seems
straightforward.  I can do this (and probably will, since I'm unlikely
to get someone else to regard this as as high a priority as I do --
it's stopping a much desired conversion from CVS).

Since I'm new to darcs, I'd like some advice on the design and
implementation.  Something easy to implement would be to add a
prefs/not-binaries file to contain regular expressions of files not to
be considered binary.  What's most in the spirit of the current
design?

W.r.t implementation, given a design similar to the prefs/not-binaries
one, my (first-look) inclination would be to change the instances of

   ftf <- filetype_function
   ...
   smart_diff opts ftf rest ...

to

   smart_diff <- smart_diff_function	-- would consider not-binaries
   ...
   smart_diff opts rest ...

.  Comments?

	thanks,
	mike