[darcs-users] encodings (was: locking)
Jamie Webb
j at jmawebb.cjb.net
Fri Mar 10 13:05:12 UTC 2006
On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 05:37:38PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Ie, as long as the user supplies the right encodings. Thus condemning
> the Chinese and Japanese to (at best) inadvertant binary treatment of
> many of their files, and (at worst) corruption of data.
Actually, the same logic should also work for at least Big5,
Shift-JIS and EUC. UTF-16 is more tricky, though I imagine Darcs
could check for a BOM if anyone felt the need.
What's the alternative? Make Darcs encoding-aware? I suspect that
would cause more problems than it solves. Insist on UTF-8? How's that
an improvement?
> As for backward compatibility, the time to break with backward
> compatibility is almost always "as early as possible", because all too
> soon you end up with "ten minutes ago or never".
I think think that depends on the reason. 'Because maintaining
compatibility is causing problems', or 'because we're crusading'. I
see few problems with the status quo (at least w.r.t. Darcs), and
nothing to gain by being more strict.
-- Jamie Webb
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