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Re: What do you Hate about Subversion?

From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch_at_stats.uwo.ca>
Date: 2007-02-02 13:08:18 CET

On 2/1/2007 9:07 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
>> There are lots of tools to convert files.
>
> There are lots of ways to keep unchanged copies of files.
>
> > I don't want svn to become
>> one of those, except to the minimal extent possible.
>
> The value of a revision control system is that it can show you the
> changes between versions. If it thinks every line changed every time
> you touch a file because you had to 'convert' with some other tool to
> make normal text, you've reduced it to the equivalent of a backup system.

I think it's about time to quit this thread, because you're talking
about something quite different from svn here. svn does allow you to
leave files unchanged: that's the default, to treat them as binary.
svn does allow you to convert line endings on text files to the local
convention.

The complaint I was replying to was this one:

> What would be "nice" would be for it to be more forgiving about input
> styles and to have options to specify that you'd prefer your output in a
> different style than native for the client where you happen to execute
> the command.

Being "more forgiving" about input styles means it would have to treat
non-text files as text, according to your local definition of what to
do. If your local definition is to "convert to text file, then treat
like other text files", why not do the conversion yourself? If your
local definition is to maintain some weird combination of eol styles,
but do it in the native way for the platform you're working on, how is
svn supposed to know what that is? It can maintain the file unchanged
on all platforms, but I can't see any reasonable way for it to handle
transformations necessary to make it native when it wasn't native in the
first place.

Duncan Murdoch

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Received on Fri Feb 2 13:08:58 2007

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