Obnoxious bug re: 'svn propedit'

Hi, folks.

I've been experiencing this bug for quite a while, hoping that somebody
would notice something so obvious and fix it. Apparently over the last
several releases this hasn't happened, though, so I've finally gotten around
to reporting it myself. If this isn't the right place, please let me know
what I need to do to get it on the "should be fixed" list.

This bug probably only occurs on Windows systems.

In particular, I have my SVN_EDITOR environment variable set to the path of
Notepad.exe.

The main issue is that when I do something like:

svn propedit svn:ignore .

and then enter a bunch of strings to ignore, such as:

build
dist
myTempFiles

and then I later try to edit the text on the same file, using:

svn propedit svn:ignore .

I get something like:

builddistmyTempFiles

This is apparently because although the file that I *wrote* had MS-DOS
linefeeds, the file that I READ now has Unix linefeeds, which Windows
Notepad can't handle. I therefore usually have to manually regenerate the
list from scratch (usually in order to add a single entry to it).

It seems to me that Subversion could follow either of two strategies
successfully:

* When propedit is done the first time, convert the file to unix linefeeds
to store it, and then convert it back to MS-DOS linefeeds (or whatever the
client system uses as linefeeds) when retrieving it for the second time.

OR

* When propedit is done the first time, leave the linefeeds in the file
alone, and don't modify them, so the same linefeeds come back on the second
edit.

The current strategy, of converting the linefeeds to UNIX linefeeds and not
converting them back, seems quite broken however. Of the two solutions
above, I'd prefer the first one, since that would allow me to commit a
property on UNIX and read it later on an MS-Dos or MacOS or whatever system.

[Note: I am aware that there are various editors out there that are better
than Notepad and can handle Unix linefeeds correctly. However, those editors
don't come installed by default on a new Windows system, and thus require
extra steps to installation instructions for coworkers. (Using WordPad
creates new problems of its own).]

Anyway, I would very much like a solution to this. It is embarassing to try
to "sell" Subversion to coworkers and have to explain bizarre behavior like
this.

Thanks for any pointers on how to get this fixed!

Derek

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Received on Mon Sep 27 23:05:52 2004