RE: making CVS binary-safe

[Stewart Heitmann]

Hi Larry,
I used to subscribe to that no-binaries-in-CVS attitude
for a long time too, but ultimately its just not viable.
User's will eventually want to add a binary,
and why should we stop them when we can easily
accomodate them?
Besides, when sharing files with multiple developers
there are some pretty good cases for adding binaries.
Such as, icons and images used for building GUI apps,
and libraries that you wish to share but not
necessarily build yourself (perhaps you dont have the
source code).

Users generally like to keep everything for a project
in one place, so they tend to use CVS as a sort of
one-stop filing cabinet for all the files in their
project, and why not. Its convenient to do so.
If that means putting binaries into CVS, then whats
the harm?

You claimed that some systems will corrupt text
files that are stored as binary. Is that true?
I've not heard of that before. Can you elaborate?

Stewart Heitmann


> -----Original Message-----
> From: larry.jones@sdrc.com [mailto:larry.jones@sdrc.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 4:38 AM
> To: S.Heitmann@lake.com.au
> Cc: bug-cvs@gnu.org; kfogel@red-bean.com
> Subject: Re: making CVS binary-safe
> 
> 
> Stewart Heitmann writes:
> > 
> > The current lore for CVS seems to be that
> > CVS presumes all files to be text unless
> > explicitly stated otherwise in 
> > CVSROOT/cvswrappers.
> 
> That's because CVS is explicitly designed to work with text 
> files.  The
> binary file support, such as it is, was a tacked on afterthought.
> 
> > However, accidentally storing a binary
> > file in CVS as text will corrupt that file
> > and cause great annoyance to the user.
> > This is a common bugbear with CVS.
> 
> And on some systems, accidentally storing a text file as binary will
> cause just as much corruption.
> 
> > Better to reverse the sitution and have
> > CVS presume all files are binary unless
> > explicitly listed as text in cvswrappers.
> 
> Better to not store binary files in CVS at all.
> 
> -Larry Jones
> 
> Mom must've put my cape in the wrong drawer. -- Calvin
>