Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Bug in CRLF conversions

[hendrik]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 09:41:03AM -0500, Ethan Blanton wrote:

> Honestly, I don't give a flying rat's butt about line ending
> transformations in any *practical* sense -- I never use any platform
> that isn't bare LF, and I seldom associate (in terms of repository
> sharing, although it stands in general) with people who use other line
> endings.  It's all on principle, here.  However, I also use revision
> control to manage a LOT of non-source files, both transformable and
> otherwise.

Suggesting that the safest thing to do about line endings is nothing at 
all.  Converting them to and from a local character code is only a 
convenience when it is needed, and a disaster when it is not.  So I 
would say, no conversion unless explicitly requested.  Now the next 
question is, how to make the request.  Even cueing on the file type 
suffix isn't good enough, because .doc is used for both Microsoft Word 
and plain ASCII text documents.

As a historical note, it is CRLF that was the original standard line 
ending, as defined by relevant American and international standards.  
CR is to start the carriage moving to the start of a line (is if you 
wanted, you could print another line ont op of the current one), and 
LF was supposed to move it vertically to the next line (yes, so that 
you could go on typing in the middle onf the line if that's where 
you were).  Unix deviated from the standard more than three decades age, 
and this is one of the few cases where Microsoft actually followed the 
standard to the letter!

And, as I mentioned elsewhere, now Unicode has another character that is 
supposed to mean newline.  If we intend to use Unicode text within the 
database, maybe we should be using *that* one?

-- nhendrik