Eric Kow <[email protected]> writes: > On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 15:58:44 +0100, Petr Rockai wrote: >> But that's not true -- this is a problem that is not solved by >> ignore-this. You still have to guess an encoding to use for patches that >> don't have the ignore-this utf8 tag. There are always to be cases where >> this fails, no matter how you choose the encoding, so it doesn't make >> sense to talk about correctness. We can only think of more or less >> successful heuristics. (In your case, if the user has an utf8 locale, >> they still get é in that patch name.) > > Do we all agree on the following two points? > > - We cannot guarantee correctness in case of untagged patches. > - But we can guarantee it on tagged patches. Yes, but you *can't tag preexisting patches*.
> I think you (Petr) are saying that this guarantee is actually not very > important in practice. I am saying that you don't get any stronger guarantee by tagging, only that you can treat untagged things as non-utf8 by default (and *that* is what I argue is not important in practice). If you always try utf8 first, it is as good (i.e. guarantees correctness) as tagging, for *new* patches, and is a very good (although not perfect) guess for *old* patches (with a fallback on decoding failure). > Somewhere for the next couple of years (old software dies out slowly) or > so, there will be an overlap period where we would not know if patches > were created with new Darcs or with old Darcs. During this transition > period, would it not be desirable to at least guarantee correctness for > the patches that are created with a new Darcs? See above. If you treat everything as utf8, there's no difference, tagged or untagged. > So I can understand that that an argument based on rarity would apply > to questions of effort-allocation and prioritisation (eg. we don't > prioritise automated nightly builds because we think the intersection of > people who want bleeding edge Darcs but are unwilling to build it is too > small). But I think it's better to avoid applying it when it comes to > questions of trying to get the right behaviour. Once again, this is not about right behaviour. > I agree that the Ignore-this tagging is ugly :-(. I'm think we're in > arguing-about-tradeoffs territory here. If it's not too early for me to > in my vote, I'll fly the conservatism flag and say that we should pay > this price of widespread ugliness, to gain that marginal improvement in > correctness. I say this (i) because we seem to be in one of these cases > where when Darcs does the wrong thing, you wouldn't really know about it > because it kinda looks right and (ii) because while we have reasons to > make educated guesses about our users [Petr's guess is a very good one], > I don't think we actually know that much about them. There's no improvement in correctness. Moreover, if we want to make any *use* of the tags, the price is not only in ugliness in metadata, but also in (ugliness of) code and in a performance hit. Think twice... > But if I could back off a little bit from my own conservatism, I'd say > that what is at stake here is "only" the patch metadata (not the patches > themselves), so it probably does not matter that much. Yours, Petr. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
