Marcus Sundman <sundman@iki.fi> writes:
> > Subversion has an internal list of mime-types that it thinks are
> > textual: text/*, and a few others. Otherwise it assumes that any other
> > mime-type is binary, and un-diffable.
>
> That's just stupid. There is no thing as "text vs. binary"! All files are
> binary. There isn't such a thing as "plain text". A "text file" is a binary
> file in some particular encoding.
>
> Why on earth don't you add support for mapping each mime-type to some kind
> of plugin that knows how to diff/merge/annotate that particular type of
> files?
Okay, time for the Nice Police.
Marcus, "stupid" won't get you very far here. And the rest of your
first paragraph is, believe me, not news to any Subversion developers.
The answer to your question (which should have been asked without the
"on earth", by the way) is that we were trying to release Subversion
1.0 before the next ice age. Therefore, in many areas we chose a
simple 90% solution that would work for most cases, and avoided
getting bogged down in complex 100% solutions that would be take a
long time and be harder to get right. This is well-known philosophy
of software development, which holds that it is better to ship than
not to ship.
The feature you're requesting is a reasonable one, it just involves a
lot of UI design work, etc. Those things take time, and this is all
volunteer labor. If you'd like to contribute constructively to that
conversation, please start a thread on dev@subversion.tigris.org --
but only without the tautologies and without the whining.
I assume you've seen
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1002
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1233
both of which are more than a year old and which are semi-related to
this problem.
-Karl
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Received on Fri Jul 30 21:27:33 2004