[Python-Dev] Mercurial, linefeeds, and Visual Studio

[Mark Hammond]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 2009/6/5 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
>> Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>>>> Essentially, pcbuild.sln is a binary file, and should be treated as
>>>> such. Maybe it's an error in the Subversion setup that it's treated as
>>>> text at all...
>>> Yes, it certainly seems that way.
>> Except it isn't a binary file - it's a text file with CRLF line endings.
>> Why would we throw away the chance to get meaningful diffs when
>> Subversion can easily get the line endings correct?
> 
> Fair point - I hadn't thought of it in that context. I wonder if
> Mercurial can treat it as a specialised form of binary file with
> custom diff/merge behaviour (which just happens to be "treat as
> text")? Of course, if that also requires client-side configuration,
> it's no better solution than win32text.
> 
> I've a feeling I've seen discussions of versioned metadata (things
> like file properties) in Mercurial at some point in the past, but my
> Google skills are failing me at the moment...

I've looked into this recently.  IIUC:

* There has been some limited support expressed for having win32text 
look in a normal versioned file for hints about the current repo.

* Once concern here was the fact that such config files are somewhat 
'untrusted', but the hg config parsing code has recently been 
reimplemented to support the concept of 'trusted' versus 'untrusted' 
options.  I'm not sure what this means in practice though.

* There isn't currently much activity on win32text.  None of the core hg 
devs seem to use Windows, so while they are receptive to Windows 
patches, it might be necessary to be quite noisy to get attention.

I recently submitted some changes to the filtering for Windows which 
were accepted without any angst, and the ability to use a versioned file 
for per-repo rules is something I'd like too.  I believe that if a few 
Windows users got together and agreed on both semantics and 
implementation we could get such an enhancement landed in the core of hg...

Cheers,

Mark