[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.




More information about the darcs-users mailing list