info-cvs
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: Checkout text files with the Unix LF (Oxa) - from command line


From: Peter Ring
Subject: RE: Checkout text files with the Unix LF (Oxa) - from command line
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001 00:00:55 +0200

cvs doesn't work, people do. Assumptions become invalid.

The concept 'DOS text files' is a stale leftover from CP/M. 
Who cares if there's a ^Z to mark the end of a 'text' file? 
I don't see any hands up. There's no end to the amount of 
grief those pesky ^Z have caused. Anyway, most work on a 
Win2K box can be done with either CR/LF or LF. MacOS-style 
can be a problem though. I have not tried VMS-style yet ;)
and probably never will. But you have got a point there.

In my philosophy, I need to save a bit more information about 
each text file. E.g., the record format and the encoding;  
just a minimal amount of information about inherent properties 
of each text file (what makes it a text file).

Unless I use and expect UTF-8 by default, there's no way to 
be sure that I don't munge text files with characters outside 
the ASCII repertoire. This isn't that much different from 
the question about what record format you want for each file 
in you sandbox. Basically, the distinction 'text' vs. 'binary' 
is too simplistic. You cannot infer what encoding I want, why 
should you be able to infer what record format I want? 

I'm just lucky that XML files by default are UTF-8 or else 
declare their encoding explicitly; this takes care of the 
encoding problem for me.

Of course I like the abstraction of 'variable-length-record 
files' that cvs provides. I just don't like cvs to second-guess 
me when I know better. At the very least, keyword expansion 
and record format translation could have been different options.


Kind regards,
Peter Ring


-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of
Larry Jones
Sent: 9. oktober 2001 17:05
To: Peter Ring
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: Checkout text files with the Unix LF (Oxa) - from command
line


Peter Ring writes:
> 
> The host may or may not be part of the use, and the 
> end-of-record format may or may not be important for the 
> host. For example, I might need to manage configuration 
> files for a multi-OS product. While I have both CR (MacOS), 
> LF (*nix), and CR/LF (CPM/MS-DOS) end-of-record files, 
> my editor (emacs) deals with this transparently, and the 
> OS that holds the sandbox have no use for 2/3 of the files. 
> Why should I need to check out files on a Mac just to do 
> something that might as well be done on Windows or Linux?

You're missing the whole point on the way CVS works.  You don't have
files with specific line endings, you just have text files.  When you
check them out on DOS, they have DOS line endings and you can edit them
or whatever with your DOS tools.  When you check them out on Unix, they
have Unix line endings and you can edit them or whatever with your Unix
tools.  When you check them out on Mac, they have Mac line endings and
you can edit them or whatever with your Mac tools.  When you go to
deploy them, you check them out on the platform you're going to deploy
them on and they get the correct line ending for that platform.

In your philosophy, what would you do with VMS files that have a two
byte binary line length followed by the bytes of the line with a NUL pad
byte if required to make the number of bytes even and no line ending
characters at all?!?  In CVS's philosophy, it just works.

-Larry Jones

Fortunately, that was our plan from the start. -- Calvin

_______________________________________________
Info-cvs mailing list
address@hidden
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]