AFAIU, the Avi's whole reason for the DVS and friends adventure is that
he has no CVS-or-better in Squeak. My understanding is that but for CVS,
we would not be discussing this issue considering that Squeak has
editors with search. And Monticello has had a working 3-way diff (I
don't know it's status), so I'm not sure I understand the "requiring
special tools" part. What more (other than a CVS) does one need beyond
existing Squeak tools?

Anyway, assuming that you want to be using existing tools, note that the
correct strategy to use is still dependent on your specific tools (which
change from person to person), and the "use platform line endings", as
CVS requires, won't always be correct. For example, my main editor other
than Squeak is EMACS, which is perfectly happy to Mac or Dos mode line
endings, however it received them.

Looking at the elegance with which emacs deals with line endings, by
simply entering an application mode depending on the file contents
awakens my old uneasiness about CrLfStreams - formats to save things in
should be an application level decision. Infrastructure classes such as
streams should not be making these decisions. Think about it like this -
if the decision is made by the application, then the user/application
programmer can elaborate behavior according to application level
criteria (code in this project should be saved in this format).
Mechanisms shouldn't dictate policy.

In fact, I'd remove CrLfStream from the image, just to prevent people
from going down this path unless they really understand the consequences
(as someone that used to have it as his ConcreteFileStreamClass, and
found his email archives between a PC and a Linux incompatible...).

Just my 2e-2 nis,
Daniel

Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> On Friday 27 June 2003 08:04 am, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> > Looking from the outside in, with the usual caveats that implies, I
> > wonder whether you would'nt be done about as fast and be doing more
> > fun and widely usable work if you focused on dumping the CVS
> > dependency instead of trying to loosen Squeak up enough that it
> > will swallow this frog....
> 
> There isn't really a CVS dependency.
> 
> The problem is this: we're dealing with source code. If we want to be 
> able to use other tools that deal with text (including CVS, but also 
> grep, diff, editors, etc.), we need to be compatible with those 
> tools' expectations for the format of text lines.
> 
> In my opinion, the pain of requiring special tools to deal with source 
> code exceeds the gain of ignoring line endings.
> 
> -- 
> Ned Konz
> http://bike-nomad.com
> GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE