>>>>> "Jamie" == Jamie Webb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Jamie> That's exactly it. You don't need to know. All Darcs needs
Jamie> to care about is whether or not it's ASCII-like. It doesn't
Jamie> matter if it's actually UTF-8, ISO8859-1 or cp1256. Darcs
Jamie> will do the right thing.
Ie, as long as the user supplies the right encodings. Thus condemning
the Chinese and Japanese to (at best) inadvertant binary treatment of
many of their files, and (at worst) corruption of data.
Jamie> Bearing it mind that most people are more interested in
Jamie> interoperability with their current setups than on jumping
Jamie> aboard a standards crusade?
Hey, if all you care about is backward compatibility, isn't Subversion
great?
I've spent going on two decades watching the East Asians deal with the
fallout of American carelessness due to the interoperability of
practically everything with ASCII, and of their own insistence on
having a better way to encode than the next proprietary standard. If
"interoperability with current setups" results in the kind of
confusion for Darcs that I've experienced with Emacs and the GNU tools
and Ghostscript, pine, Perl, and Python, I'd like to be sure that
nobody can say "but nobody warned us!"
As for backward compatibility, the time to break with backward
compatibility is almost always "as early as possible", because all too
soon you end up with "ten minutes ago or never".
--
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
ask what your business can "do for" free software.
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