[Monotone-devel] Re: I'm stuck, was Re: a little status update

[graydon hoare]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:

> Actually, it seems like all the values in MT/options are affected, not
> just the value for 'branch', and this is regardless of the value being
> empty or not.  This is because Graydon switched to use the token
> parser to go through MT/options, and if the quotes aren't there, the
> value (or part of the value) is condidered a token, not a string.

yes, sorry, in all the bug-related talk it slipped my mind to mention 
this: the MT/options file and the .mt-attrs file now both use the same 
basic_io system that the revisions use. I'm just trying to cut down on 
the number of "slightly different" file formats we've invented for 
printing and parsing. probably I'll keep using this format for any 
future .mt-foo files as well. basic_io has some nice properties:

 - quotes the "value" part of a key/value pair, and does proper
   escaping of quotes. thus resistant against values with embedded
   spaces, quotes, or other unusual UTF-8 characters.
 - depending on your idea of "nice", formats the text a little nicer.
   (aligns the right sides of the left fields and the left sides
   of the right fields.)
 - throws real parse error messages with input coordinates when it
   fails, rather than silently dropping lines.
 - doesn't require boost.regex (though manifests and packets still do,
   I'm considering hand-coding those readers as well)

the practical upshot is that you have to quote the second field of
each line in any existing versions of these files before the reader will 
enjoy reading them.

-graydon