Erik Huelsmann wrote:
> * Subversion was intentionally designed not to modify files under
> version control until explicitly told to do so. You may not think your
> files changed when you want different line-endings, but others may:
> say you checked in a subversion dump file. If the system started to
> subsitute line endings for you, the file would have been damaged
> beyond repair, even though it looked texty. The default is (and
> *should stay*) to protect your data.
>
> Please don't project any problems you may have right this instant on
> the version control system you're using: your problems are (largely)
> unrelated to version control, but to inter-OS moving of files.
Thanks Erik. I can see your point. However, it is a design decision of
Subversion to use a heuristic for determining whether something is text
or not. Compare that with FTP: if you transfer in "ASCII" mode it will
modify a UNIX file and create it with CRLF on Windows, and vice versa,
i.e., it uses an explicit mode rather than a heuristic. Since most VCSs
started being used for storing and controlling program source files, I
was expecting a similar behavior.
It still seems to me that forcing clients to deal with auto-props is not
the best decision since it's too easy to miss a file suffix or have some
newbie developer in a large mixed-platform group forget to set props and
start submitting changes and screwing things up (yes, the peers will
hopefully catch the problem before it gets too far, but IMHO the VCS
should be preventing this).
As I hinted before, I'd prefer a server-based capability that says: all
our files are text files and we want to store them at the clients in
native format and at the server as "collection of logical lines", except
for files which we specify as binary at the client. This still would
allow companies that have mostly binary files to specify otherwise
(either at the server or the client).
Joe
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Received on Mon Jul 3 00:37:36 2006