Re: Poll: do we really need newline conversion?

>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?

As the Macintosh SourceSafe developer, I spent a good deal of time in
the EOL normalization code during the three years I worked on it.
Here are some observations:

- Visual Studio didn't handle Macintosh EOLs worth a damn. (I haven't
checked it lately.)

- People will edit a file that has been copied from one OS to another
without the benefit of EOL renormalization, move it back and put it
back into the source control database.

- People will use stupid text editors that don't bother to check what
the line endings are. They may even be able to read the file and
display it correctly, but only add new material using their native
EOL sequences.

- God awful things can happen to C preprocessors when they hit
non-native EOL sequences.

- You can't accurately diff text files on all platforms if they
aren't EOL normalized.

- You can't use files sizes to compare files if they aren't EOL normalized.

- EOL normalization makes the files in the database smaller. (Not a
big deal until you've got 300,000 files that average 5,000 lines
each).

-- 
- charles
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