[dna-dev] End-of-line characters

[Randall Hauch]

John,

Why don't you commit the change to the Eclipse preference file that's  
in SVN, and developers can start grabbing that.  We can then bulk  
change the files after that.

Best regards,

Randall

On Jan 21, 2009, at 10:12 AM, Randall Hauch wrote:

> Considering that we already have files with every combination of  
> line delimiter (though thankfully each file is consistent), has  
> anyone experienced problems in your development environments?  If  
> so, please speak up.  I know Eclipse handles them well enough, and I  
> suspect other Java tools do as well.  And for the most part I think  
> the operating systems and tools are pretty good about how they  
> handle these files.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Randall
>
> On Jan 21, 2009, at 10:00 AM, John Verhaeg wrote:
>
>> I'd like to propose that we change our Eclipse preferences (or the  
>> associated preferences in whatever IDE you use) to force all  
>> created/edited files to be saved with UTF-8 encoding and to use /n  
>> (LF) as the end-of-line delimiter.  I'd also like to convert all of  
>> the existing files in the DNA repository to use this encoding and  
>> delimiter.
>>
>> Currently the files in the DNA SVN repository contain a mixture of  
>> encoding formats and end-of-line delimiters based upon the default  
>> behavior of the OS that was used to create them.  With regard to  
>> delimiters, Windows ends lines of text with \r\n (CR/LF), *nix with  
>> \n (LF), and OS X with \r (CR).  Eclipse apparently attempts to  
>> maintain the encoding and delimiters used when the file was  
>> originally created, but other editors and file manipulation tools  
>> don't.  This sometimes results in multiple delimiter techniques  
>> used within the same file.
>>
>> One of the main problems with this situation is many tools can't  
>> handle this mixture of encodings and/or delimiters.  Git, for  
>> instance, relies upon \n only to determine what constitutes a  
>> line.  Thus, if you modify a single character in a git-managed file  
>> created using OS X, then compare the file to the one in the  
>> repository, git will report the entire file has changed.  I've also  
>> seen problems in the past where someone inserts a copyright symbol  
>> in a file header comment from Windows, and subsequent compilations  
>> fail on a server performing continuous builds using Ant.
>>
>> Given that we do standardize our encoding technique, I doubt anyone  
>> would object to the ubiquitous UTF-8 standard.  Regarding the  
>> delimiter, the two characters used by Windows increases the size of  
>> each file needlessly and, considering DNA is a JBoss project,  
>> Windows will probably be the least commonly used platform by  
>> developers.  The OS X seems inappropriate simply due to the number  
>> of tools that assume the existence of line-feeds.
>>
>> I'd like to get everyone's feedback on this proposal.  Since the  
>> second part of this proposal probably involves modifying a large  
>> number of files in SVN, we'd obviously want to do this sooner  
>> rather than later.  Please comment when you get a chance.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> John Verhaeg
>> Red Hat, Inc.
>> (314) 336-2950
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>
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