Last day to vote/reject on proposed EOL names

[Paul Schauble]

Unfortunately I think the only way to be sure of the file format is to
have the person sitting at the computer tell you. You can mechanically
guess at the format and ask "Is this file UTF-16LE?" but ultimately only
the one creating it knows.

    ++PLS

-----Original Message-----
From: bazaar-bounces at lists.canonical.com
[mailto:bazaar-bounces at lists.canonical.com] On Behalf Of Stephen J.
Turnbull
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:11 AM
To: Michael B. Trausch
Cc: bazaar at lists.canonical.com
Subject: Re: Last day to vote/reject on proposed EOL names

Michael B. Trausch writes:

 > I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I have a few questions as a
 > user.  First, why have the format stored in the repository be
 > customizable at all?

Not "customizable", but variable.  For backward compatibility; you
don't want to have 100% of the lines in a file change because you
change branch format to one that supports EOL with a different EOL
(which should, by the way, be U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR).

You could support this by normalizing anyway and having the diff
algorithm know how to deal with it ... but that is going to be
annoying to deal with for external diff commands.

 > Why not have a normalized format inside the repository?

New text files should.  But see below.

 > Secondly, why not detect the user's environment and use whatever
 > settings are reasonable for the working copy based on the user's
 > operating system?

Because sometimes you want to be able to see the raw data that others
see.  Preferably without having to be in the same room with a Windows
machine. 8^)

 > line endings.  But the repository format should be normalized
 > completely

*Completely*?  That would sorta hose all your PNGs, don't you think?
<wink>  The repo format *cannot* be normalized until there is a 100%
(and 99.44% won't do) reliable way of determining which files are text
and which are binary.

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