Re: [lmi] Should we restrict cvs files to ASCII?

[Greg Chicares]

On 2007-04-17 12:58Z, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:50:12 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> GC> I see this inadvertent change:
> GC> 
> GC>   ChangeLog,v 1.618 2007/04/17 12:33:09
> GC> -  "§21.2206(1)(I)-(M), (O), (Q)-(S) and (U)-(V) Supplemental - Other"
> GC> +  "�21.2206(1)(I)-(M), (O), (Q)-(S) and (U)-(V) Supplemental - Other"
> 
>  This is probably due to an editor which does conversion to UTF-8
> automatically... Which also means that it's probably impossible to even
> notice that it has happened. And while Codestriker should have shown it
> it's still easy to miss it.

May I ask whether it's visible in Codestriker? I'm getting some
other work out of the way right now, and I'm not yet familiar
enough with the tool to know how to determine this efficiently
myself. The reason I ask is that I'm encouraging my compatriots
to report any shortcomings we perceive to Codestriker's author.
(You don't need more practice doing that, obviously.)

> GC> How do other projects typically prevent this?
> 
>  Not using ASCII at all is a solution, of course. Otherwise the best is
> probably to standardize on encoding to use for 8 bit characters. Either
> ISO8859-1, ISO8859-15 or UTF-8 could be reasonable choices for us.
> 
> GC> Should we just restrict all files in cvs to ASCII?
> 
>  This really depends on whether you think we really need to use such
> characters (including § above, but also ones like © or ® or ½ or ¤) or
> not...

Ours is a highly-regulated industry, and '§' appears a couple
dozen times in comments that cite laws or regulations; there's
really no good substitute. Let's see if we can continue to live
within ISO-8859-1, the old base charset for html.