Re: What do you Hate about Subversion?

Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>
>> Given the possible combinations, it is not at all difficult.
>> Generally you'd want \r, \n, \r\n, and an oddball \n\r to be
>> equivalent on the way in,
>
> Okay, suppose we're on Windows, where the native format says \r\n is an
> eol. Treating \r, \n, \r\n to be "equivalent on the way in" means they
> all get transformed to \n in the repository, the way \r\n is currently
> handled? Then as soon as I checked them out again, they'd all be
> converted to \r\n. That was my first option: convert everything to
> text. But here you've got a version control system modifying your
> files. I don't think that's something it should do. Changing files is
> the responsibility of the user. svn should not change files, except in
> perfectly reversible ways (the way it currently handles true text files).

I think we have a philosophical difference about the nature of text.
Text existed long before computers with their various ways of
representing it, and representing it in different ways does not change
the content of the text. If you want to store it in ascii or ebcdic it
is the same content. If you want to put it on punch cards that don't
have a representation for line endings, it's still the same text. And
it certainly doesn't change just because different currently popular
platforms represent the line endings in a slightly different way. The
important thing for a revision control system handling text is that it
can show the differences in content, not the unrelated storage format
that may have held it at various times. Suppose you wanted to present
the text of a proposed amendment to a law for a vote in some political
body. Would you show just the changed wording in its context, or would
you have to present the entire volume in the before/after states because
you had to copy to different media and now can't track the portion that
may be changed?

Subversion has the option of treating files as a meaningless stream of
bytes, which is fine for other purposes. For text, it needs to track
the meaning instead.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com
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