Re: CVS & SSL

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Saturday, June 2, 2001 at 07:42:50 (+0800), Mark Harrison wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVS & SSL
>
> Are you suggesting that we should not rely on our version control system
> to generate well-formed text files?

No, I'm suggesting that if you have to rely on using non-compatible text
file formats portably across some number of incompatible systems then
you'd better learn to deal with their differences in some way that does
*NOT* rely on your version control system!

My suggestion has *ALWAYS* been to only ever store just unix-format text
files in CVS (even if your repository doesn't currently sit on a proper
unix-like system).  How you do that is up to you.  My suggested
implementation has (always, iirc) been to do the conversion when reading
and writing the file from/to the client filesystem and to *always* do
the network communications in unix format.  I think this scheme would be
flawless, but it's elegance seems to escape many people.  This scheme is
of course easier to implement now that all of the other tools CVS uses
on the client side are now integrated directly into the program....

However it's very important to note that such an implementation still
wouldn't excuse you from learning to properly deal with the different
formats outside of the version control system!

FYI I'm currently re-learning Smalltalk (with Squeak) and I'm still
struggling to understand why the Squeak VM doesn't always read and write
native-format files by default (except for, of course, binary platform-
independent files that are meant only for it to read and write).

Using this as an analogy I think one should consider the CVS repository
files to be a binary platform-independent file format that just happens
to also be compatible with unix-format text files.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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