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Re: setting a convention for property values

From: Nicholas Riley <njriley_at_uiuc.edu>
Date: 2002-12-04 20:23:41 CET

On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 10:22:07AM -0600, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Long ago, we decided (sensibly, imho) that Subversion would set a
> policy of using UTF-8 for log messages. Technically, we didn't have
> to do this, but it aids interoperability by preventing encoding
> anarchy.
>
> Yesterday, Jon Trowbridge pointed out that we really ought to do the
> same for property values. We already do it for certain properties
> whose values are interpreted by Subversion itself (svn:ignore,
> svn:keywords, etc). Jon's point is, why not do other clients the same
> favor we do ourselves? Textual data is useless if you don't know the
> encoding, and if we're hoping for unexpected property usages to arise,
> it'll help a lot to define a standard here.
>
> One response, of course, is "You can't do that, because property
> values are binary!" But no one seems to have needed a binary property
> yet, and it seems much more likely than property values would be text.
> Anyone can base64-encode to get binary values if they really need
> them, but optimizing for textual data seems reasonable.

I have no objection to what you want to do with text properties, but I
already have lots of binary properties in my repos (using a svn
wrapper script for Mac resource forks). If you declare that binary
properties are the way forward, I need some way to fix my existing
properties ;-) - preferably as automatic as possible, for example svn
detecting binary properties the way it detects binary files and
auto-encoding/decoding them would be nice.

-- 
=Nicholas Riley <njriley_at_uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
        Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
  Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Received on Wed Dec 4 20:24:28 2002

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