Seems my remarks about subversion book went to this list, so
let's continue with more general thoughts. As short intro: I am
currently using and co-administering CVS repository (being a
person who made my organization to use CVS that 4 or 5 years
ago), currently I watch subversion and slowly consider whether
it would be good move for us...
Let me first describe the problem we currently have. I am Polish
and that means in particular that in the texts I write I use
some national characters. Those characters are defined within
iso-8859-2 encoding and used so on all Unix, Linux, VMS, Mac and
VMS platforms. But our friends from Microsoft decided to create
and use so called win-1250 encoding where those national
characters are placed somewhere else. Now, we are developing
some cross-platform libraries and software, co-developed by
people working on Windows and Linux/Unix/VMS. An this results in
the mess - whoever writes a comment, readme, whatever, uses his/
her natural character encoding, people working on the other
platform see this as a strange chars. We are routinely
converting all that to iso-8859-2 but this means Windows people
always see this wrong.
BTW: this problem has some similarity to the famous CR vs CR/LF..
I think I see the fairly natural solution which subversion could
implement to help solving such a problem. What I need is
an ability for pre-commit hook to change the modification text,
additional checkout/update hook and an ability to bind some kind
of property to the client (sandbox) and make it available to the
hook. I imagine it so:
a) For every textual file I define some kind of property (say
'natural-encoding') which tells what should be the natural
(repository) file encoding. Maybe some commit hook verifies
whether this is set but this is not so important. Maybe natural
encoding is always UTF-8 and need not the property.
b) In pre-commit hook I convert the file between the encodings in
case the client encoding differs from the natural encoding of
this file (of course only for the files which have the property
activating the whole mechanism, this is not good idea to do it
for Word docs). Here are the two needed subversion features: the
hook needs the info which encoding the sandbox is using (some
kind of sandbox property forwarded to the server while
commiting) and an ability to modify the changes being commited
by the pre-commit hook.
c) Similarly, some update/checkout hook would convert opposite
way. Here one need to have such a hook at all, to give to it the
client property and to influence the file body.
This way it seems possible that each sandbox will use its natural
characters encoding in the way similar to using its own end of
line mark.
What do you thing about such a idea? Or is there something else?
By the way: I think that sandbox properties, checkout/update hook
and data modification in hooks could have more usage than the
character conversion. As a quick example for the first two,
sandbox marked with 'official build' property could allow only
checkouts from tags directory...
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Received on Thu Feb 19 15:25:55 2004