Re: [Monotone-devel] mtn cat vs. mtn automate get_file

[Thomas Keller]

Nathaniel Smith schrieb:
> Does it matter?  If the file can be displayed reasonably as text, then
> you might as well do so; if it can't, then it doesn't matter what the
> user says, you can't show it as text.  I think a heuristic based on
> the file contents should be sufficient here... (this is exactly what
> diff(1) does, for that matter).

Now, if monotone could serve me such a heuristic, this would be nice. 
Otherwise I could only think of "check every byte in a string and if 
there is a zero byte \0, handle it as binary". I don't know if its that 
simple, but I doubt it a bit. What could make problems for example is 
text encoded in different encodings which use multiple bytes and I could 
accidently handle the first byte of one letter as a binary indicator. 
This leads me to another interesting question: Has monotone any internal 
knowledge of different charsets or is just everything utf-8 and only 
decoded into the user's charset if its written to disk? So, do I get 
contents in utf-8 out or the charset (whichever it was) the user checked in?

> 'cat' seems like a fundamental enough operation that we might as well
> just provide it as a primitive.  ('get_file' is a primitive too, in a
> difference sense.)  Perhaps get_file_of, by analogy to
> get_manifest_of?

Out of curiousity: What is the difference between both primitives beside 
that they take different arguments? Wouldn't it be better to have one 
command with different input rather than two?

Thomas.

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