Re: Proposal to fix CVS binary file implementation

[Mark D. Baushke]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2001 10:56:52 -0800, From: address@hidden (Paul Sander)
wrote:
> 
> Also CVS currently can't handle the case where a single sandbox directory
> contains working copies of files collected from more than one directory in
> the repository.  The Entries file would have to be modified so that the
> fullpath (or path relative to CVSROOT) to the RCS file is stored there.
> Unfortunately, Entries field separators are the same as Unix path separators
> ("/") so this would introduce an incompatible change.

This would depend on the implementation of the new feature. It might
make sense to extend the Entries file format after the tag_or_date
field instead of modifying the entries that come before it.

Only the first five '/' characters are defined as separators at
present. Nothing requires that '/' characters found after that need to
be separators.

For future expansion, it is probably wise to leave '/' as the
delimiter. However, the new field is still open to new semantics and
if desired, the additional field could be defined to have an escape
character to enable the following two digits to be the hexidecimal
representation of the character escaped. This would borrow from the
design of URLs (using %xx) or quoted-printable MIME (using '=xx')
characters.

The only real concern is dealing with directory separators that are
NOT the / character for the directory name (eg, VMS pathnames) that
are mounted across heterogeneous operating systems (a tree that is NFS
exported and visible from both Solaris and VMS for example).

        -- Mark