Re: svn blame not working for files which had binary mime-type in a previous revision

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 01:57:16PM +0100, Ferenc Kovacs wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I would like to bring up an old issue here:
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2089
> > I've just bumped into this, and first it was really confusing why would
> svn
> > blame work with one xml file, but not with the other, as the
> > Skipping binary file: 'reference/apc/book.xml'
> > wasn't really helpful.
> > I understand that the discussion back in 2004 didn't reached an agreement
> > about how to resolve the issue, but could we at least change the error
> > message to something like:
> > Skipping binary file: 'reference/apc/book.xml' as binary mime-type was
> > found in revision X, use --force to proceed.
> >
> > This would at least lessen the confusion on the users part.
> >
> > ps: please cc me to the replies as I'm not subscribed to the list.
>
> Sure, this is a small but useful improvement, and also serves as
> a reference to star wars (ep. 4 to 6 only of course :)
>
> I've made the message say the follwing (in http://svn.apache.org/r1441017
> ):
>
> Skipping binary file (use --force to treat as text): 'foo/bar.xml'
>
> Are you happy enough with this change being shipped in Subversion 1.8
> when it is released? I don't think this qualifies as a bug fix we must
> backport to the 1.7 series. This change affects translations, which are
> rarely updated on release branches and I'd rather avoid breaking them.
>

Hi Stefan,

I would be ok with shipping it in 1.8, and while I think that the suggested
wording is better than the current as it suggest a solution, but personally
I would be still confused why would subversion treat my file as binary
while by all obvious means it is a text file.
It is really unintuitive to guess that blame doesn't work because the file
HAD a binary mimetype in the past (and from a quick test it seems that the
blame will be skipped even if the versions shown by blame all happened
after the binary mime-type was removed).
So if possible I would prefer telling the user why is that happening.

-- 
Ferenc Kovács
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu