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

[Bruce Stephens]

"graydon hoare" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> that said, if the hook interprets things it finds in .mt-attrs, and a
> default hook interprets a "binary" flag as meaning no-conversion, and
> converts everything else, then it may be possible to make user-friendly
> in the general case without losing precision in the special case.
>
> (I should point out that while it sounds nice on paper, you cannot
>  reliably infer text-ness or particular charset encoding; you can infer
>  when something is *definitely* outside UTF-8 or ASCII, but not the other
>  way)

Bother, you're right.  I'm most concerned that the common case of
US/European software developers (mostly working with ISO-8859-1 files)
working on Unix and Windows can work sanely, and I think the easiest
way to do that is to have a canonical form of the files stored in the
repository.  But you're right that trying to mangle line-endings by
default has a very good chance of screwing up multibyte character set
files, and that's unlikely to be an acceptable default behaviour
nowadays.