[Monotone-devel] Re: line endings with 0.31

[Bruce Stephens]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Now, please, before you start reacting, I *know* that the whole file
> isn't stored, only the delta.  Unfortunately, I know diddly over
> squat about xdelta, so a question is if storing different EOL
> formats at different times creates more trouble than it's worth.

Not sure.  It would make the deltas bigger (if the delta represented a
single-character change you might need a separate copy for every line
(perhaps plus a record for the EOL) rather than two big copies plus
the changed characters).  I'm not sure whether that would be
significant over the lifetime of a repository.  It might well depend
on usage patterns.

I must admit it feels like the wrong way to do it.  Better (I'd have
thought) to store some canonical form in the repository and let the
clients do conversion.  What's currently missing is a way to specify
what the canonical form ought to be like: whether the file's text or
binary, whether it has special line-ending requirements (like some VS
files seem to have).  Subversion splits this: svn:mime-type specifies
whether a file's binary or not, and svn:eol-style lets you change the
line ending.
<http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.advanced.props.html#svn.advanced.props.special.mime-type>,
<http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.advanced.props.html#svn.advanced.props.special.eol-style>.

[...]