Re: make cvs text agnostic?

[Paul Sander]

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>Frederic Brehm wrote:
>> The CVS clients already do this. The problem comes when people use a 
>> file system cross mounted on several different kinds of OS, checkout on 
>> one OS, and then edit and commit on another OS.

>I wonder why people do this?  Anyway, it shouldn't matter, should it,
>even what Jouni says is true (see below)

The practice is common in shops that have policies against committing
stuff that doesn't compile, and that require single sources that compile
on all of their supported platforms.  The developers tend to check out
on their Unix boxes into a shared filesystem, debug and compile, then
switch to Windows to debug and compile there, and finally commit the code
from an arbitrary platform.

>>> Autodetection of binary
>> 
>> There are enough times when autodetection gets the wrong answer that 
>> many people on this list will vigorously oppose having CVS doing this 
>> automagically.

>Jouni Heikmniemi also mentioned that 8bit text would make it difficult. 
>  I still think that for the typical case (source code) the detection 
>would be quite reliable.  And reversible, except if you use double
>chars where one of the chars just happened to be the same as a \r or \n.

Unfortunately, there are many types of source code.  For programs written
in, say, the C language, what you say is probably true.  For message
catalogs whose purpose is to match numbers with text in some arbitrary
language, it's a bit harder.

Also, there are times going the other way, when a binary file is
erroneously recognized as text.

It is possible to build a mechanism that is accurate to any arbitrary
level, but certain vocal members of this group seem to think that if
it can't be 100% reliable out of the box then it isn't worth implementing.

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