Poll: do we really need newline conversion?

Recently, some people posted asking whether Subversion should even
bother to perform newline conversion.

On pondering the question, I have to admit they have a point. :-)

   * Modern text editors handle all newline styles transparently.
     It's true that Windows Notepad doesn't work with LF-only files,
     but then again, Notepad also doesn't do files larger than 32kb,
     so I feel pretty comfortable not worrying about Notepad.

   * Although we've had some problems with the line endings in
     .dsp/.dsw files, solving those particular problems certainly
     didn't require Subversion to do newline conversion; they were
     more a matter of pilot error.

   * Mike Pilato argues (convincingly, IMHO) that newline conversion
     is way outside the scope of a version control system anyway, that
     it's just a weird bit of creeping featurism that doesn't even
     provide something terribly useful anymore, and has the potential
     to damage data (since it's a departure from faithfully versioning
     whatever people checked in).

Frankly, I'm thinking we shouldn't bother. Why spend time on a
feature that a) people rarely need these days and b) has the potential
to do unexpected things to people's data?

Would like to know what other people think...

(Note that this question is independent of keyword substitution, and
also doesn't affect our need to recognize text vs binary files --
we'll always need that differentiation, so we know when we can use
patch to do textual merges.)

-Karl

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:52 2006