On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Wilson, Ronald <rwils...@harris.com> wrote: > How is abandoning backwards compatibility in any way linked to winning? > Frankly, > I’m surprised at how often MS seems to get beat up on this list; many of us > are > Windows users and developers. Personally it gets under my skin; maybe it > shouldn't. > Kudos to Windows for supporting customers with backwards compatibility and > interoperability - something that other operating systems apparently can't be > burdened > with.
Unix/Linux per se, dosen't care about line endings. At least some versions of the more/less/page utility do auto-detect line endings and do the right thing. The various command line shells are less good at this - but those are not actually tired to Unix/Linux, and if you build them for Windows with out proper configuration, they will have as much trouble with line endings on Windows as they do on Unix/Linux when fed a file with line endings other than just plain LFs. True, Windows does (or did) have a "text mode" when opening files, but even this is under control of the application requesting a file be opened. For the most part, applications that parse or manipulate the text inside files should be responsible for coping with various line ending conventions, not the OS, or other tools that treat files as opaque containers. VCS apps are in a gray area. Their primary mission is to manage revisions of files. However, various concerns, especially effificency, make it desiable to get inside those files for the purpose of finding the smallest set of differences between revisions so as to store just the differences against a reference copy, rather than stroing a full copy of each revision. While not essential, being able to cope with differences in line endings can make the difference sets smaller. Code Page / Character Set incompatabilities are a much bigger issue. Because auto-detection of the code page is impractical in most cases, it is better to configure the needed translations rather than rely on the tools to guess correctly. As such, probably better to handle with the hook mechanism when it becomes available. _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
