Re: started applying Marcus' patch

Marcus Comstedt wrote:

>=?UTF-8?B?QnJhbmtvIMSMaWJlag==?= <brane@xbc.nu> writes:
>
>
>
>>Marcus Comstedt wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Or having some syntactic convention of the name (other than "svn:") as
>>>I suggested in the other mail, or some other mechanism. I don't think
>>>a generic metaproperty system is a necessary or even particularily
>>>good solution.
>>>
>>>
>>That's the same thing, but worse. :-)
>>
>>
>
>By refering to "some other mechanism" (as of yet unspecified) as
>"worse",
>

I was referring to the syntactic convention you proposed. But read on.

>should I take it that you are opposed to the very idea of
>letting the user use properties for both binary and text data?
>

Um, they already can, even though Subversion doen't know about what
they're using them for.

>May I ask why?
>
>

Because, if we go down this road, then sooner or later we'll start
recording the prop values mime type, newline convention, ...

User-defined props will presumably be application-specific. If users or
their applications care about the distinction, they can invent their own
naming scheme, magic header, or whatever. They can even validate and
modify the values using a pre-commit hook.

A long time ago, somebody advanced the idea that we should enforce a
property naming scheme (e.g., like the reverse-domain-name scheme used
in Java), so that different user applications wouldn't tromp on each
other's props. It was turned down for much the same reasons.

BTW, the fact that we munge file contents has no bearing on the issue.
We know for sure that newline conversion and keyword expansion are
commonly used, useful operations, expecially in software development
environmnets. We have no idea how users will use props, or whether the
code we put in now will ever be used outside our regression tests.

Maybe we'll revisit this issue in 2.0, after we've had time to gather
enough usage data (and specific feature requests).

-- 
Brane Čibej   <brane_at_xbc.nu>   http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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