[darcs-users] locking

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Webb <j at jmawebb.cjb.net> writes:

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

Old Mac is ASCII-compatible, but Darcs won't recognize the newlines
(since they're carriage returns).

    >> which requires recognizing a character.

    Jamie> Not with UTF-8.

How do you know you've got UTF-8 if you don't know what a character
is?

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

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

And so are lots of encodings that you really don't want to have to
think about.

    >> 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).

    Jamie> I'd suggest that the current design is better.

I'm dubious.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.