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Re: Extraneous CRs in transfer of draft-crocker-email-arch-04.txt

2005-03-31 14:58:00


On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 09:46:19AM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:
 I'm going to conclude that the problem is on
 your end (do you perhaps have CRs embedded in the file on that "Fedora"
 Linux system instead of native (newline) line endings?) and move on.


As far as I can tell:

1. All of the components involved on my "side" of this are pretty popular, 
so
serious problems would be expected to have emerged before this.

2. You are the only one having a problem. No one else has reported a problem
with this document, nor with any other document I have generated and made
available in a similar fashion.  I've been using these pieces for something
like a year, so I would have expected problems to have been reported by now.

Well, I see the raw CR characters too, but I don't see it as a problem.
I just edit them out.  I (too) suspect that Dave is storing the text
file on bbiw.net in "wire format" and not in its native OS format.

Or better still, use an editor like BBEdit that is line-terminator-smart and
just does the right thing with no muss and no fuss. BBEdit handles CRLF, LF,
and CR terminators with equal facility, and you can tell it to preserve line
terminators or force them to a particular sort on saves. I tried it on Dave's
draft and it handles the CRLFs fine, even though they aren't the Mac-native
CR-only format.

My one gripe with BBEdit is that it uses binary mode to store files via FTP.
This works fine when the line terminators choice you've made is workable on the
destination system, but fails badly when there's a mismatch. Mode A would fix
this in a lot of cases, but it isn't available. Grrr.

Another alternative is to use an OS that has filesystem level support for
different sorts of terminators. (OpenVMS supports 8-9 different terminator
styles, including but not limited to CR, LF, and CRLF.) Actually, the Mac is
approaching this given its mixed LF-only and CR-only ancestry.

                                Ned


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