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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?
From: |
Marcus Sundman |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings? |
Date: |
Fri, 27 Aug 2004 19:59:00 +0300 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.7 |
> The way I see it, encoding of text files is part of the policy of a
> group of developers. Arch/tla is just a mechanism of keeping track of
> said developers' work.
So what encoding should you use when you have a team of four windows users
and four linux users, and all of them are in different parts of the world
and have different local encodings? I don't think those linux users wants
to use the same 8bit/char encoding (such as LC_ALL=x.ISO-8859-15) and most
likely some of them want to use some tool that doesn't support multibyte
encodings such as UTF-8. And what about the windows users? Cood luck trying
to get their windows boxes to support something like UTF-8.
And then when some of those people are in several different projects, all
with different "encoding policies", should they get VMware and run
different copies of windows in that, one for each project?
Or wait, I know. They could all make wrappers around all their tools, and
then they could provide command line args on each invokation:
"tail -n 3 --encoding=windows-1252 input >output" or
"tail -n 3 --encoding=UTF-8 input >output" depending on which project you're
using. Wouldn't that be nice? Or perhaps one could think of something even
more stupid.
And what about pathnames? Oh, no problem there. Never mind that the windows
users won't be able to checkout all those files containing ':'. Just let
them suffer. Nobody asked them to use windows anyway, poor bastards.
Seriously, there will _always_ be teams with people using different
encodings. Some people don't know better, some don't care, some think there
is no way around it. If you believe this not to be true then you're living
in a dream.
- Marcus Sundman
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?, Andrew Suffield, 2004/08/27