[darcs-users] locking

[Jamie Webb]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2006 at 11:38:21PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Webb <j at jmawebb.cjb.net> writes:
> 
>     Jamie> e.g. we can always insert new lines rather than adding
>     Jamie> characters to existing ones, perhaps like this:
> 
> Recognizing a line requires recognizing a newline,

Yes, but that issue is nothing new. Darcs already AFAIK will not work
with character sets which are not ASCII-compatible, because it already
has to recognise newlines. My point is that character-based diffs do
not make the situation any worse.

> which requires
> recognizing a character.

Not with UTF-8. 

> Eventually you have to put constraints on what Darcs considers to be
> text.  I would recommend "UTF-8-compatible and not declared binary" as

That's a bad way of putting it. Very little is 'UTF-8-compatible'. The
point is that UTF-8, ISO8859-x, etc. are backwards-compatible with
ASCII.

> a reasonable heuristic for most purposes, with "UTF-8-compatible and
> declared text" as the bullet-proof alternative, and "declared unibyte
> text with newline = LF" as a reasonable backward compatibility
> compromise (note that this is fairly safe for Windows since you can
> think of CR as a nuisance whitespace character, although
> darcs-inserted newlines without CR would probably confuse most Windows
> editors).

I'd suggest that the current design is better.

-- Jamie Webb