[PREVIEW] line-endings support

[Ian Clatworthy]

Talden wrote:

> Properties in Subversion are sometimes used by users tools to drive
> workflow or to annotate content to add information.

The second usage is pretty straight forward. Can you give an example of
the former?

> The 'eol' property proposed here is different - this special property
> changes the behaviour of the version control tool to store content
> that is potentially different to what the user committed.  This is an
> important distinction as changing the value of the property can change
> the value of file content.

I agree. To me, that's one of the reasons why putting eol support into
the core is a better choice than only supporting it via a plugin.

> I agree that
> - EOL conversion shouldn't be applied by default (behaviour won't
> change with upgrades unless requested).
> - Flags controlling EOL conversion should be version controlled
> (needed for history stability).

So if our initial cut of eol support stored it's settings in user
configuration files (like bazaar.conf and locations.conf), that would be
a problem? Or just suboptimal?

I'm wondering whether the interpretation of the eol settings is truly a
property/responsibility of the source tree or whether it is a
property/responsibility of the Bazaar installation. Consider the ugly
case where developers have working trees on network drives (either NFS
or Samba) that are being accessed by both a Linux and a Windows version
of Bazaar. I can imagine those developers wanting different eol settings
to other Windows only developers working on the same code.

> This is not a challenge to the value of the VP feature, only a
> challenge to the appropriateness of using it (as a UI) for EOL
> conversion.

Well put. I don't have an answer on how to make them scale and perform
well but I agree that version properties solve a range of problems in
the tool integration space. Even if VPs already existed in Bazaar
though, I'm not sure implementing eol support over the top of them would
necessarily be the right choice.

Ian C.