Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: line endings as project policy

[hendrik]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 01:28:42PM -0800, Justin Patrin wrote:
> On 11/27/06, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> >Some OS's make it hard for rank beginners (though possibly experienced
> >on other systems) to find out how to do the necessary conversions.  But
> >that is not a version control problem.
> 
> What conversions do you mean? Any decent text editor should be able to
> deal with any line ending and not mess with it. Of course, I use emacs
> which does the right thing with any of the three. Leaves it alone.

I use emacs, too.  Now that it has started guessing the file type 
depending on the line endings, it's getting hard to change the 
line endings when you need to!

> However, I just thought of one case where some auto-munging would be
> nice. Some of the people in my office use DreamWeaver to edit some
> code and it always changes the newlines to whatever it's set to.... It
> will read in any, but always save in what you have set, which is of
> course mac newlines by default. It would have been nice if the VCS
> said "newlines are different" and stopped the checkin as I then have
> to go fix that person's editor, then change the newlines on the files
> they changed, then re-check them in which kills the log/blame.

Which suggests one option is to
*  recognise line-ends of any variety
*  ignore the line-end type when merging lines
*  but then, for lines that haven't changed except for line ending,
   restore the original line-endings so that the differences don't 
   become excessive.
This does require that the merge have some idea of which is the 
"original" and which is the "changes".

-- hendrik