RE: [Monotone-devel] Attempted discussion reboot: line-endings

[Kelly F. Hickel]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden
> [mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of
> Nathaniel Smith
> Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 4:52 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [Monotone-devel] Attempted discussion reboot: line-endings
> 
...
> 
> (b) is something that people have come to expect from VCSes (given the
> at least CVS, SVN, p4, clearcase support it...), and while it's kind
> of annoying to support I can see the point here too.  The discussion
> from before (as summarized on the wiki page) seems to come down to:
>   -- the only important cases are "no conversion" and "\n in repo,
>      native EOL in workspace"
>   -- enabling the latter behavior should be controlled by an attr
>   -- there should be a convenient way to automatically set this attr
>   -- we should never to any lossy conversion (e.g., convert a file
>      containing mixed \r\n and \n to all-\n).  This guarantees that
>      even if a binary file accidentally has the attr set, it cannot be
>      irrecoverably destroyed.
>   -- however, this means that we need to have some sensible strategy
>      for what we _should_ do when we encounter a file with mixed or
>      wrong line-endings.
> Assuming these summary points are correct, I think this gives the
> following action items, if anyone wants to improve monotone's
> line-ending support in this respect:
>   -- implement a nice mechanism for automatically setting attrs on
>      files (.mtn-autoattrs?)
>   -- pick some least-bad strategy for how to respond to files with
>      mixed line endings
>   -- use this strategy to implement line-ending conversion
> 
> Personally, I'm also open to the argument that line-ending conversion
> is obsolete, and (a) alone is all that's really needed.  (E.g., I
> could imagine that if the only tools that cared about line endings
> were compilers, then it might be more appropriate to add line-ending
> conversion support to your buildsystem than to your VCS; but that's
> just one possible situation.)  But this all depends on user needs and
> situations and what people want to invest the time into implementing.
> 
> -- Nathaniel

I'd like to add that I should be able to override whatever the "native
eol" setting is via command line option.  This is for when I need to
checkout on windows to a samba share mounted from a machine where mtn
doesn't (yet) run.

I personally don't know anything about the monotone source code, but if
someone laid out what needed to be done, I'd be happy to help.

-Kelly