Binary vs. Text properties

[Jennifer Bevan <je...@alouysius.net>]

I had a question after reading Philip's pointer to the past discussion
about text vs. binary properties.  I would think that a relatively simple
(depends on current implementation, sure) thing to do would be
to change <name,value> to <name,type,value>.

propset could default the type to text/plain;charset=utf-8 for all 
properties
unless a --mime-type option is used.  That should address the compatability
issues with text.  Users who want to store binary files that aren't a 
mime-type
would still have a place to give some type or endian-ness or whatever.

 It seems that the only concern with this approach previously
mentioned was the redundancy in the type storage, but I'd rather have
redundancy with disk space costing what it does than go the whole
inheritance route <*shudder*>.

I think one problem with this would be if someone wanted to set a text 
property
that wasn't UTF8, but that probably should fall under the policy of
enforcing a standard for compatability purposes.

Hmm.  I'd go ahead and try to make a patch for this, but the school quarter
isn't over yet, I have my class project to finish up, etc., and maybe y'all
have something to say about my "relatively simple" assumption.

-Jen




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Re: Binary vs. Text properties

[Greg Hudson <gh...@MIT.EDU>]

On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 13:39, Jennifer Bevan wrote:
> I had a question after reading Philip's pointer to the past discussion
> about text vs. binary properties.  I would think that a relatively simple
> (depends on current implementation, sure) thing to do would be
> to change <name,value> to <name,type,value>.

+1 in principle.

In terms of getting there... I don't think we can assume that existing
properties are UTF-8 text.  So, any heuristics we use now must continue
to live in the code base for A Good Long Time, and be applied to untyped
legacy properties.

This is also a big enough change that it probably needs to wait until
after 1.0, even if some nice person implements it before then.  Though,
if the implementation turns out to be not so bad, I'd be open to
changing my opinion on that front.


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Re: Binary vs. Text properties

[Julian Foad <ju...@btopenworld.com>]

Jennifer Bevan wrote:
> 
> I had a question after reading Philip's pointer to the past discussion
> about text vs. binary properties.  I would think that a relatively simple
> (depends on current implementation, sure) thing to do would be
> to change <name,value> to <name,type,value>.
> 
> propset could default the type to text/plain;charset=utf-8 for all properties
> unless a --mime-type option is used.  That should address the compatability
> issues with text.  Users who want to store binary files that aren't a mime-type
> would still have a place to give some type or endian-ness or whatever.

I think that extending the property mechanism in any such way would be opening a big can of worms - or rather a big dish of agar gel on which lots of little worms would rapidly multiply.

We need to keep Subversion simple so that it can get to a stable state and be released (while still providing the means for doing more complex things on top of it).

- Julian


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