RE: make cvs text agnostic?

[Matthew Herrmann]

Okay, agreed, but let me put it this way:

you are working on a project with files called *.doc, some containing text
and some containing binary. People have complained they don't like adding
the -kb and many get it wrong.

do you
a) take the error-prone option of people setting -k sticky flags themselves?
(yuck!) (then they go and throw weird variants on it with keyword conversion
and what not and see what happens)
b) say "well from now on don't call your text files *.doc, call them *.txt"
c) invent a heuristic detector which understands 382 languages and 3483
filetypes

whatever little problems there may be, i really think (b) is the easiest.
this really is a case of the "shortest path".

if files don't have meaningful extensions, the purpose of which is to convey
a unique file type, then the responsibility lies _there_ to fix the problem.
autodetection of types is a drastically appaling workaround for something
that just doesn't need to be a big issue.

(and can't cvswrappers files be defined on a directory level? then, wrappers
could be set up for each folder and the different types of documentation
stored in each one of these)

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Sander [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Thursday, 29 August 2002 10:16
To: address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: make cvs text agnostic?


>--- Forwarded mail from address@hidden

>re this conversation of file types -- why autodetect them, isn't that the
>whole point
>of a file type, given in every file's extension? heuristic detection of
>binariness -- yuck!

That only works if you have a strict naming convention.  The canonical
counterexample is the ".doc" extension which can represent any one of
dozens of data types, some of which are pure ASCII and some of which
are not.  Many shops have never standardized the tool they use to produce
documentation (and therefore have a few), and several tools default to
that specific extension.

>a mechanism already exists to tell with this problem -- why don't people
>just make a whopper of a cvswrappers file and then be done with it?

Because cvswrappers won't work with this counterexample.

>--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden