Re: BUG(?): "svn diff" behaves incorrectly on symbolic links pointing to binary files

On 6/15/05, Vincent Lefevre <vincent+svn@vinc17.org> wrote:
> On 2005-06-14 22:42:13 -0500, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
> > This behavior has nothing to do with symlinks. If you 'svn add' a
> > text file, then replace its contents with binary data, Subversion
> > never finds out that it changed from text to binary, and will happily
> > diff it (unhappily for the user, of course).
>
> Concerning this point, I think this is a bug (but a different one):
> if in the diff, there are non-printable characters, then they should
> be filtered out when the output is a tty. Otherwise this can mess up
> the terminal. (I'm not sure whether this problem is unix-specific or
> more general...)

The theory here sounds reasonable. (I'm making the simplifying
assumption that people generall don't want terminal control sequences
sent in their diffs. Do people use them -- for instance, as text
formatting codes -- in ways that they want to see onscreen?)

I'm not sure it'd be easy to define "non-printable", since that'll
depend on the screen and the locale, though. If the practical goal is
to avoid wedging terminals by sending control sequences, perhaps it'd
be enough to escape ASCII control codes (i.e. 0x00-0x1f) other than CR
and LF.

Can anyone who knows more than I about various terminals' screen
control comment on how often control sequences live outside this
range. (I'm not considering codes of the form <ESC><non-ctrl-byte>+,
since escaping ASCII control codes would prevent this from hosing the
terminal, at the cost of some screen droppings in the output.)

Would such a change be specific to diffs, or would it extend to other
terminal output, such as property values?

-- 
Regards,
Charles Bailey
Lists: bailey _dot_ charles _at_ gmail _dot_ com
Other: bailey _at_ newman _dot_ upenn _dot_ edu
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