[darcs-users] encodings
Stephen J. Turnbull
stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Mar 15 08:54:39 UTC 2006
>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Webb <j at jmawebb.cjb.net> writes:
Jamie> On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 05:37:38PM +0900, Stephen
Jamie> 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.
Jamie> Actually, the same logic should also work for at least
Jamie> Big5, Shift-JIS and EUC. UTF-16 is more tricky, though I
Jamie> imagine Darcs could check for a BOM if anyone felt the
Jamie> need.
Good luck. Big5 and Shift JIS are not ASCII compatible, they use
octets in the 0-127 range for multibyte characters. Big5 even uses
control characters. UTF-16 standards don't even require a signature
for on-the-wire use, so you can't count on presence of a BOM. In
practice, you often won't get one for internal formats (eg, word
processor files).
Jamie> What's the alternative? Make Darcs encoding-aware?
No. Not worth the effort.
Jamie> I suspect that would cause more problems than it
Jamie> solves. Insist on UTF-8? How's that an improvement?
Because it places the responsibility for breakage squarely on
somebody, and not incidentally breaks things for a significant share
of users if done in isolation, thus providing incentive to find ways
to avoid that.
>> 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".
Jamie> I think think that depends on the reason. 'Because
Jamie> maintaining compatibility is causing problems', or 'because
Jamie> we're crusading'. I see few problems with the status quo
Jamie> (at least w.r.t. Darcs), and nothing to gain by being more
Jamie> strict.
*You* see few problems. Are you in a position to see the problems I
see, or are they unimportant merely because you don't live with them?
--
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.
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