If things were different, they'd be different. However, we live with the legacy of that stupid set of decisions and have no real option to resolve it permanently short of deprecating entire vistas of tools (or even entire operating systems).
I think you missed the solution to the problem that Mark proposed (IIUC): a local commit to a hg repository should already get the line endings right, by automatically converting the file-to-be-committed into the repository line endings. This is what CVS has supported for more than ten years, and what svn supports for close-to ten years.
* distributed VCS has the job of preserving data as present on the filesystem, including whatever line-ending convention is present in a file.
No, that's not true. Distributed VCS has the job to help the developer. That may mean to preserve the file as-is, or it may mean to convert the file on checkout and checkin. Which of these would be needed depends on the file, of course.
It's not a simple thing to solve, and many clever people have tried over the decades. The fact that a centralised VCS can put the problem aside by requiring an explicit, single decision in the repository, is no help when addressing the constraints of a distributed VCS.
Why do you say that? It's not true. The approach that has worked for the central repository can work just as well for a distributed repository.
At some point, the decision about how to handle line endings in cross-platform data needs to be punted to a human for a context-sensitive assessment, since (as can be seen) the above list of requirements is internally inconsistent and can't be relegated to a one-size-fits-all algorithm.
Right - there needs to be a way for the user to specify what line endings to use. That's why both CVS and subversion have supported such configuration, on a per file basis, for many years. I can't see why hg couldn't, in principle, support the same configuration. Being a DVCS, such configuration would have to be part of the clone, of course, being versioned, and all that. I think hg is well capable of keeping versioned configuration information in the clone, as demonstrated by the .hgignore files. Regards, Martin