I'm donning my flame suit and am going to try to pour a cup of water on
this mess instead of a cup of gasoline.
On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 17:13 +0000, John wrote:
> eric <eric <at> ehlarson.com> writes:
> > Open source communities don't expect every user to contribute, but they
> > do expect that if a user wants a specific feature that isn't part of the
> > current community plan, that user will contribute.
>
> Absolutely, if it's not part of the plan. But if people suggest something
> *should* be part of the plan, they should be given a fare hearing.
>
> I can't see a good reason why case-insensitivity shouldn't be part of the plan,
> for the greater glory of SVN etc etc (the community does want to encourage win32
> uptake I guess - it's a big market, lots of jobs, support contracts etc. these
> things make the open source world go round). The only reason for it to be
> excluded is 'we don't really care about win32 and OS X', which would be sad.
Many developers who contribute to SVN use OS X and win32, not just *nix.
Each operating system has limitations and advantages.
If you search the mailing lists you will see the topic of "case
sensitivity" covered quite a few times, usually degenerating into a
{flame,holy} war. It has been discussed many times.
There is a suitable "workaround" involving a pre-commit hook script to
check the case of files committed and reject transactions that have
modified case files.
The patch to fix this in subversion is non-trivial and forces the code
to become something that I think the developers do not want it to be.
Separate code sections based on operating systems. I imagine this would
be a maintenance nightmare and why there is the dependency on APR to
minimize these system specific code blocks.
> > If they don't
> > contribute, well that feature couldn't have been that important after
> > all. I am not sure how a platform could be a partner here - how would
> > you establish a partnership with an operating system?
>
> ?? OS's would be equally well supported by the code: We fully support the Linux
> file system. We fully support the Windows file system. They are equal partners.
As I understand it John is going to start working on a patch to fix
this. Here are my hints as a green, newbie contributer:
1) Study the HACKING{.html} file.
2) Write clean code that conforms to the GNU style standard and compiles
without warnings.
3) Put your ideas on the dev mailing list before implementing.
People will disagree, argue and more importantly *help you* come to a
conclusion that will be more likely accepted into SVN in the end without
wasting a lot of effort going in the wrong direction.
Cheers,
Chris
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Received on Sun Jul 24 20:57:24 2005