Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Marcus Sundman]

> The way I see it, encoding of text files is part of the policy of a
> group of developers. Arch/tla is just a mechanism of keeping track of
> said developers' work.

So what encoding should you use when you have a team of four windows users 
and four linux users, and all of them are in different parts of the world 
and have different local encodings? I don't think those linux users wants 
to use the same 8bit/char encoding (such as LC_ALL=x.ISO-8859-15) and most 
likely some of them want to use some tool that doesn't support multibyte 
encodings such as UTF-8. And what about the windows users? Cood luck trying 
to get their windows boxes to support something like UTF-8.
And then when some of those people are in several different projects, all 
with different "encoding policies", should they get VMware and run 
different copies of windows in that, one for each project?
Or wait, I know. They could all make wrappers around all their tools, and 
then they could provide command line args on each invokation:
"tail -n 3 --encoding=windows-1252 input >output" or
"tail -n 3 --encoding=UTF-8 input >output" depending on which project you're 
using. Wouldn't that be nice? Or perhaps one could think of something even 
more stupid.
And what about pathnames? Oh, no problem there. Never mind that the windows 
users won't be able to checkout all those files containing ':'. Just let 
them suffer. Nobody asked them to use windows anyway, poor bastards.

Seriously, there will _always_ be teams with people using different 
encodings. Some people don't know better, some don't care, some think there 
is no way around it. If you believe this not to be true then you're living 
in a dream.


- Marcus Sundman