RE: Poll: do we really need newline conversion?

Hello everybody,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karl Fogel [mailto:kfogel@newton.ch.collab.net]
> Sent: Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2001 18:21
> To: dev@subversion.tigris.org
> Subject: 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. :-)

When I hit on the "Reply" button I wanted to add my +1 for leaving
conversion out, but considering some things made me change my mind ...

I think SVN should be "newline conversion aware". If I check out a "Unix"
file on Windows without conversion I just get a file with linefeeds. If I
edit it with "write.exe", write will happily parse the file but save it back
to disk with changed linefeeds. How shall SVN interpret it? If I later on
view the differences between the original version and my version, what do I
see.

   a) Convert it back to "Unix" convention, so I'll later see the changes I
did
   b) Check in in as write left it, so I'll later see "one big diff to rule
them all"

a) Opens a can of worms. Maybe the conversion problems can be overcome one
way or another, maybe they can't.

b) Is not nice if you want to read diffs between two versions, especially if
people frequently check in from different platforms.

So ... having conversion _in_ SVN makes some sense, since SVN has to grok
the files we throw at it.

-1 on leaving out LF conversion if we can come up with a scheme that does
not destroy files and surprise people. If I can _see_ what SVN did in some
history logs and if I can _undo_ it at any later time conversion is useful.

+1 on leaving out conversion if conversion may destroy something

Dropping back to lurk mode,
  Froh

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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:52 2006