Subject: Re: CRLF fun stuff again...

From: Duncan Sinclair <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 19:53:07 +0000

Marc Miller writes:
>Then perhaps that needs to be added to the other Unix text
>editors.  That's a more comprehensive solution than editing netatalk
>anyway.  It would allow people to take files produced by *any* *version*
>of netatalk regardless of what the cr/lf setting was set to on that
>machine.  My $0.02.
>

OK, so emacs, the Great Satan of Text Editors, (cf. www.theregister.co.uk)
can do mac line-ends.  That's because it has too many features, including
the ability to run on Unix and Mac and Windows, so it has to be able to
figure out different line endings.

But how easy would it be to get, say, Sun to change thier version of
vi to do Mac line-endings?  And grep, more, less, wc, awk, sed, and
all the other standard unix utilities?

Rather than change all these programs, wouldn't fixing netatalk be
a good idea?

Cheers,

Duncan.

---

From: Donald Lee <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 19:17:00 -0600

I'm the first to admit that it is really nice for the filesystem to
come to you, rather than to make the users cope with the varying
format of text files.  I also am not saying that efforts to "fix"
netatalk are not worthwhile.  I'm saying that given the varying
behavior of the MacOS, utilities, applications, etc.  It turns out to
be a hard problem, and there are cases where you end up thinking
files are TEXT when they're not (like Quark).

For my money, it's not worth the risk.  I don't want people to think
that the feature has a simple solution that will be complete and
reliable because they will likely get bitten.

The archives of this list have a *lot* of discussion on this topic.

-dgl-