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

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

In message <address@hidden> on Wed, 18 Aug 2004 12:19:44 +0100, Bruce Stephens 
<address@hidden> said:

monotone> Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:
monotone> 
monotone> [...]
monotone> 
monotone> > What does "canonical form" mean to you?  My though was
monotone> > that monotone would store the actual bytes of the file as
monotone> > read from the file system.  This will work for any byte-
monotone> > and stream-oriented file system.

I've changed my mind, it feels like we need to keep track of text
vs. binary files.  Treating a text file as a binary has some less
charming consequences, for example of a file coming from a Mac would
then be checked out on a Unix box and displayed with 'cat'.

  "Dude, how the heck does that one-line file work?...  Oh..."

monotone> > If we should ever think about record-oriented file
monotone> > systems, like the one used on VMS, that's another level of
monotone> > portability (and worms).
monotone> 
monotone> Indeed.  I think it's best to ignore such systems for the
monotone> moment.

Dude, you're telling the wrong person :-).  I have "VMS Whacker" in my
email name for a reason (and no, it's not sexual :-)).

But OK, I'll let that rest for the moment...

monotone> It should do what it presumably does now at some point: if
monotone> the file looks like binary, then regard it as such,
monotone> otherwise, regard it as an ordinary text file and convert it.

Does it really do that?  The only place where I've seen any attempt at
guessing being done is the function guess_binary(), which is called in
one place only (ls_certs(), for rename certs with binary value (what
the hell *are* those, anyway?)).

Cheers,
Richard

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Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/