[Monotone-devel] Re: character set.

[Graydon Hoare]

Lapo Luchini wrote:
> Bruce Stephens wrote:
> > It used to store the binary deltas in base64, IIRC.  (Just an
> > implementation detail, in other words.)
>
> OK, but that's only because SQLite2 had problems with \0 most probably, 
> and has nothing to do with the actual content of committed files; on the 
> content being binary-safe, I guess we would have discovered any bug by 
> now for sure, we even committed gigs of binary content (photos) at the 
> summit ;-)

(de lurking temporarily)

It's actually because monotone was initially -- perhaps as many as 5 or 
6 years ago -- built to communicate by blindly flooding changes over 
unauthenticated transports, including junky 7-bit ASCII channels like 
SMTP and NNTP, and just filtering out the stuff it received but didn't 
trust. For a time it even had a micro-NNTP client.

The packet system is there for that reason. SQLite2 just compounded the 
reasoning. But it's all completely obsolete.

-Graydon