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

[Ethan Blanton]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker spake unto us the following wisdom:
> In message <address@hidden> on Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:26:13 -0500, Yury 
> Polyanskiy <address@hidden> said:
> ypolyans> Some motivation why maybe it still should be done. Why we
> ypolyans> want line endings translation at all? Because frigging
> ypolyans> windows software doesn't handle lone \n's or \r's very well
> ypolyans> (notepad, etc). Mac software I believe is much better in
> ypolyans> this respect so they can live w/o translation.  Can anyone
> ypolyans> using Mac comment on this?
> 
> The operating systems usually don't care about line endings, it's the
> utilities that do.  Try 'cat' with a file that has \r as line endings
> on most Unix systems, and you will see one fluttering line.  Some
> editors have a bit of difficulty with "strange" line endings.

This is precisely why Yury is correct.  Because, on many systems, \r
and \n have _different meanings_, they should be properly and
reversibly preserved even in text files.  What Yury is saying, if I
understand it correctly, is that the following file:

Now is the time\rfor all good\nmen to come to the aid\rof their country.\n

Would be, after a checkout and checkin with a hook like Yury's:

Now is the time\nfor all good\nmen to come to the aid\nof their country.\n

This is clearly *not* what one would expect, given the contents of
Yury's hook, binary or not-binary.  Preserving binary files without
conversion is an orthogonal problem.  In this case, the problem
happened to present itself in binary files, but it would seem to me to
be a problem for text files which take advantage of the semantics of
\r and \n, as well.

Yury, please correct me if I've misunderstood the situation.

Ethan

-- 
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils].  They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
                -- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764

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