On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 01:29:41PM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote: > Now the tagged format doesn't support encoding --binary or --text mode, > but that got me investigating whether cksum should support these at all. > My conclusion is that it should not, and just use binary everywhere. > I.e. cksum should not support --binary or --text. Reasons: > > - cygwin is the main consideration here, and it seems to be defaulting to > binary these days > - i.e. text/binary is a confusing distraction for the vast majority of > cases > - The cygwin model seems to be being subsumed by the WSL model anyway > - Shared checksum files for text files stored in system native format seems > quite edge case > - Even then, one can always convert to system native after verification > - The functionality is retained in the standalone utils if needed
Agreed. Particularly given RMS's goal of not adding new features that work on non-GNU systems but not on the GNU system. (Yes, --text "works" on GNU systems in that it is a no-op there, but it was very confusing that the default output on Cygwin was ever non-binary to begin with, which was different than the default output being binary on GNU systems) > > Interestingly one place where we might care about processing in text mode, > is for the checksum files themselves, but we don't actually handle that at > all :/ > Looking back I see many users having issues with \r chars messing up --check. > Eric Blake had a good suggestion to encode \r in file names and then ignore > real \r chars in checksum files. I'll implement that now while were working > on this. Thanks for (finally) getting around to my idea from years ago! -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
