[Monotone-devel] Re: line endings as project policy

[Bruce Stephens]

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

[...]

> That leads me back to thinking that we still need to mark files that
> are getting changed, and that something automatic should happen to
> them, so a file will look the same checked out as before it got
> checked in.

I'm sure we discussed all of this the last time around (and probably
the time before that; possibly I'm thinking of discussions in OpenCM
or GNU Arch).

Storing things as binary seems easy, but that's likely to cause
irritation for projects that use Windows and Unix.

More aggressively converting files that look texty also seems not too
hard, but it may break files that have inconsistent line-endings, and
files that are text but require a specific line ending convention.

On the whole I think the second is a better option.  Basically do what
subversion seems to do: guess when files are text, and mark them as
such; have an option that lets people specify the line-ending
conventions of a file, but by default assume the native convention.

If you want to be paranoid, I guess for files claimed to be text,
monotone could check, and only allow that if the line-endings really
are consistent.  (That should prevent trashing files: the worst is
that you'd have to say what the line-ending convention really is.)

[...]