Line feeds and uncooperative clients.

[Derek Pomery]

We have been using Forte for Java development, which uses CVS for 
version control.
Previously, the windows client would use an external binary (defaulted 
to Cygwin).
Recently, however, they included their own.

Also recently, I have been noticing an increasing number of files in CVS 
with extra blank lines.
Once I caught the Forte client in the act.  It seems that the file 
(which had been last edited in forte) had gotten checked onto the server 
in DOS format.  Forte, however, when checking it out, seems to have 
converted the extra CRs into LFs.  As a result, the number of blank 
lines in the file kept growing.
Even worse, occasionally Forte would check in the file completely 
stripped of newlines.  The Forte mailing list was less than helpful and 
claimed this could be expected of trying to do CVS across platforms.  I 
am certain the built-in CVS client is at fault but I could not find an 
option to make certain it was converting to unix format before checking 
in, and in any case, a number of clients could be used, and it doesn't 
seem reasonable to have file integrity be all purely client side.

I realise I can add a script that blocks checking of files in DOS 
format, but I wanted something more.
Is there a place to add a trigger on checkin convert all files tagged as 
text to unix format before adding the revision?
Also, can I get away with running a script across the repository to try 
and eliminate extra newlines and DOS format text files?  Is there 
anything it would break right away?

Just wanted peoples opinion before I do something extreme, desperate, n 
stupid like arbitrarily rewriting bits of cvs or slapping a wrapper 
around it in the pserver.