> To: dev@subversion.tigris.org
> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@newton.ch.collab.net>
> Date: 11 Dec 2001 11:20:37 -0600
> 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. :-)
>
> * 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.
I don't think the issue is notepad displaying LF files as a single
line with some strange hollow squares instead of newlines. But no
EOL conversion could bite you in quite a few situations... IIRC
UltraEdit can be set up to display LF files properly, and convert
them to CRLF when you write them out. Check out, modify a single
line, and commit. Oops, the diff is somewhat longer than expected...
> * 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.
.ds[pw] files shouldn't undergo EOL conversion, but should be
"diffable", IMO.
> * 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).
Well, this is a matter of taste. I could agree that EOL conversion
is beyond the scope of a RCS, but then I could also argue that so is
the "commit email" feature, for example. It has nothing to do with
revision control after all.
> 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?
I think that you should discriminate text files and binary files,
like images.
I sincerely hate the bug in CVS that causes it to EOL-convert, and
expand keywords in all files by default, and it made me really happy
to read that the plan was to have both of these of in SVN (in the
Design Notes).
But I think that having these two features off by default,
independent of each other, and maybe even independent of whether the
file is "text" or "binary" would be the perfect solution.
So... -0.5.
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:52 2006