From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein@lyra.org]
>On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 02:16:36PM -0800, Billy Tanksley wrote:
>> From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein@lyra.org]
>> >People out there are NOT always going to use a decent editor.
>> >We better be
>> >able to deal with that. And "deal with" means "not screw them
>> >over hard." We really ought to be able to compensate for
>> >wackiness from the user.
>> Not if "compensating for wackiness" means "attempting to act
>> intelligently." Which it seems to mean in this case.
>It is possible for the computer to know exactly what was
>meant, and to do so
>unambiguously. "intelligence" would seem to imply ambiguity,
>and in that case: I would *highly* agree with you.
How? We've already covered a billion different cases here. There's no way
to tell in advance what the right thing to do is. The only thing we *know*
is that the right thing to start with is *do nothing*; Linus may weep when
the sh files break the first time they're checked out, but we're going to
provide him a way to instruct svn how to set them right (somehow). With
user intervention, we can solve this problem reasonably easily. Without it,
we're up a creek.
>> And it appears to me that "screw them over hard" means
>> "require a single use
>> of a CRLF converter". That doesn't match my definition. To
>> me, "screw them
>> over hard" means "default to data-destroying
>> transformations", and that's
>> totally out of the question at this point.
>I don't know the name of the program on my linux box to do newline
>conversions.
According to the discussions we've been having, it sounds like the name is
'svn'. I didn't originally like that idea, but as long as it's not on by
default, I realise that it is very convenient, especially since the
conversion can vary from file to file (I don't want to run dos2unix on ALL
my files, only the ones which actually are line-ending-adjustable).
> I don't know how to execute it. Yes, I could dig around
>(somebody mentioned "dos2unix", maybe that is a lead). And are
>there similar tools available to me on Windows?
Yes, even if this wasn't part of svn.
>What if I'm a relatively computer illiterate?
If you're computer illiterate and you're working on a multiplatform system,
either someone else on your team knows how to handle multiplatform problems
or you're screwed over hard, but it isn't svn's fault either way. If you're
not working on a multiplatform project, you'll never need, want, or like
lineending conversion.
>> >[ this reminds me of programs (e.g. parsers) that say
>> > "you're missing a
>> > semicolon right <there>". well, thanks a lot Mr Program, why
>> > didn't you just put it in there for me? you know it
>> > should be there ]
>> Easily answered -- because you might have meant to put in a
>> curly brace right over <there> instead. The program knows it
>> ain't smart, so it doesn't munge your data.
>I was referring to programs that *do* know. No need to try and say my
>example is "wrong" -- I get to specify it, not you :-(
Sorry. I just assumed you were joking, and thought a smiley wasn't needed.
Surely you agree that even if such problems were common,
line-ending-conversion isn't one of them; we don't "just know" what to do.
Of course, problems like that are far from common. I'm thinking of one
right now: Python's use of ":" to signal the end of an if statement (not
needed because only one expression can go in an if statement, so ":" is the
only thing that will fit). You can read the comp.lang.python archives to
see why the Python developers keep that unneeded syntax in the language --
they have several positive arguments for it.
>-g
-Billy
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:53 2006