making CVS binary-safe

[Stewart Heitmann]

To CVS maintainers

The current lore for CVS seems to be that
CVS presumes all files to be text unless
explicitly stated otherwise in 
CVSROOT/cvswrappers.

However, accidentally storing a binary
file in CVS as text will corrupt that file
and cause great annoyance to the user.
This is a common bugbear with CVS.

Better to reverse the sitution and have
CVS presume all files are binary unless
explicitly listed as text in cvswrappers.
This makes CVS safe for all file types.

No change is required to the CVS source
code to do this, it simply needs the
cvswrappers file to be correctly configured.

I have already done this, and would like
to contribute it to the CVS effort.
Please find my cvswrapper file attached.

I hope others would find it useful if you
could include my cvswrappers file in the
standard CVS distribution.

Perhaps the manual could be updated to
address this issue too as it gives the
impression that the text-as-default model
is the only way.

Hope it helps

Stewart Heitmann
Software Engineer
Lake Technology
http:\\www.lake.com.au
mob 0404 074 558 
tel +61 2 9213 9050
fax +61 2 9211 0790

cvswrappers
Description: Binary data