Re: [Axiom-developer] viewport in build-improvements

[root]

> > Sure many files *look* like text files, but you have heard Tim saying that
> > 
> > 1) a SCM should never change the line ending format
> 
> Tell that to Windows folks.

Consider the domain and range of an SCM. It should map files to files
as an identity operation with a side-effect of maintaining history.
An SCM only needs to know that bytes are bytes. Maintaining history
as diff-format files is an optimization, not a requirement.

Changing \n-files to \r\n-files is the responsibility of some other tool.
If the translation occurs at all it should live in the client end since
that is the part that knows about the user environment.

> > 2) some files are random access files. If SVN replaces \n by \r\n at 
> > checkout time, they are corrupt, since the byte count at the beginning 
> > of the file does not work anymore.
> > 
> 
> .ht, .pht, .bitmap, .pixmap, .xbm and .data in Axiom distribution are
> text files.  Hyperdoc uses byte counts to access .ht and .pht, but
> the file positions should be recomputed anyway.
> 
> Postscript files are more tricky: .ps files in Axiom distribution
> are text files, but in general Postscript may contain binary data.
> I think in the future we should decide if we want binary Postscript
> in source repository (ATM I did not touch .ps files).

In general the repository should contain whatever files are needed
to make the project. Clearly documentation will require various
binary files such as jpg, flv, mov, mp3, etc. These will change 
over the life of the project and need to be historically tracked
just like everything else.

Although I chose arch and it "does the right thing" I have to say
that GIT seems to have the SCM philosophy most clearly implemented.

t