RE: How to treat XML files checked into CVS

[Arthur Barrett]

Yves/Andy,

> > 
> > No.  XML files are text files and should be treated as such to get
> > correct line endings.  If you really don't want merging, then use
> > *.xml -m 'COPY' instead, but merging XML usually works just fine.
> 
> They are text, but UNICODE, which CVS can't handle properly, 
> so you are 
> better off to deal with them as binary.

Binary will mess up the line endings as Larry already explained, and
store the deltas in the repository quite inefficiently.  If the file is
UTF-8 then text would be the best choice.  If the file is UCS-2 or
UTF-16 then binary or CVSNT (see below).

If you really need Unicode/UCS-2/UTF-16 support then you can switch to
CVSNT  (yes it's GPL/LGPL and yes it runs on linux/unix) which has
native unicode support (-ku or even -k{utf8} ).
http://www.cvsnt.org/manual/html/Substitution-modes.html

CVSNT also supports what are termed 'static' files, which are files that
are generally checked out from the repo server, but not checked
in/committed even if they are changed on the client (you can force
checkin if you really want to) - which allows the repo server to have a
copy of the Visual Studio XML project files to 'seed' a workspace, but
allows the developer to change the local environment to suite their own
preferences without messing up everyone elses (of course if you add a
file to the project then you've got to check in some mods, or perform
the add on a clean checkout or something).

If you are using CVSNT please post your questions to the CVSNT
newsgroup.

Regards,


Arthur