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

[Bruce Stephens]

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

[...]

> jon> I'd argue MIME types aren't useful in this context.
>
> Having thought some more about it, I agree, and so does Bruce as far
> as I understand.

There are clearly potential advantages, in that you might have some
special diff tools for some file types (for example, tree based
operations for application/xml).  However, I suspect the advantages
are some way in the future, if they'll ever appear.

[...]

> I'm not sure why we would need to keep track of anything but the
> local line-ending.  Really.  Text is text.  Text is a vector of
> lines, basically.  Line ending isn't really something that should be
> considered part of the text per se.

Almost always, you're right: text is text, and you want it with the
client's native conventions.  However, now and again (because of some
broken tool, or broken process) it does matter: some tool needs the
file with some specific line-ending convention, regardless of the
platform's convention.  Such cases are sufficiently rare, though, (or
seem so to me---there may be domains where the situation is much more
common) that it wouldn't be a disaster if they were ignored entirely.

[...]