[Monotone-devel] Re: Looking at the code affected in bug 9752 leaves a weird taste...

[Bruce Stephens]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> One way to solve this problem is not to bother with it at all, i.e.
> view all files as binary for internal representation.  It looks to
> me like this is already the case in parts of the code, for example
> in calculate_ident(), but I haven't look too thoroughly in that
> code, so I don't really know...  Anyhow, if we keep files in the
> database as binary blobs and only bother with line separators and
> character conversion for visual purposes (for example to display the
> diff between files), we're quite safe.

That seems cleanest to me: store files in some canonical form, and
then the indication of file type (what subversion uses a MIME type
for) is really an indication of how to convert between that canonical
form and something that's useful on the client's platform.  

However, if that's stored in the database rather than in a hook (and I
think it ought to be in the database), then there's a chance that
it'll change, so it probably needs to be versioned, and rules decided
for merging, etc.

[...]