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CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

(fossil-scm.org)
422 points km | 2 comments | 13 Oct 24 19:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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perching_aix ◴[13 Oct 24 20:09 UTC] No.41831129[source]▶
Well, at least the title is honest. Straight up asking people to break standards out of sheer conviction is a new one for me personally, but it's definitely one of the attitudes of all time, so maybe it's just me being green.

Can we ask for the typical *nix text editors to disobey the POSIX standard of a text file next, so that I don't need to use hex editing to get trailing newlines off the end of files?

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201984 ◴[13 Oct 24 20:20 UTC] No.41831233[source]▶
What's wrong with trailing newlines?
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perching_aix ◴[13 Oct 24 20:21 UTC] No.41831241[source]▶
Other than select software being pissy about it, not much. Just like how there's nothing wrong with CRLF, except for select software being pissy about that too.
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tryauuum ◴[13 Oct 24 23:56 UTC] No.41832819[source]▶
I do like concatenating files with cat, and if a file has its final line not ending in newline symbol the result is ugly.

I know it's just me but my worldview is that the world would be better if all editors had "insert final newline" behavior

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perching_aix ◴[14 Oct 24 00:02 UTC] No.41832858{3}[source]▶
My problem is that what I input (and observe!) doesn't match what's persisted. Worse still, editors lie about it to me until I close the file and reopen it. And just to really turn the knife, various programs will then throw a fit that a character that I did not input and my editor lies about not being present, is present. I hope it's appreciable why I find this frustrating.

I expect my editor to do what I say, not secretly(!) guess what I might have wanted, or will potentially want sometime in the future. Having to insert a newline while concatenating files is a chore, but a predictable annoyance. Having to hunt for mystery bytes, maybe less so.

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1. bityard ◴[14 Oct 24 01:02 UTC] No.41833180{4}[source]▶
I have been using and programming Unix systems for almost 30 years and have not run into anything like what you are describing.

What Unix program "throws a fit" when encountering a perfectly normal newline in the last line in a file?

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2. perching_aix ◴[14 Oct 24 01:17 UTC] No.41833263[source]▶
"Unix programs" I haven't ran into throwing a fit per se. That's why I didn't write that.

What I ran into issues with was contemporary software that's shipped to Linux, such as Neo4j, which expects its license files to have no newline at the end of the file, and will actively refuse to start otherwise.

I have a feeling I'll now experience the "well that's that software's problem then" part of this debate. Just like how software not being able to handle CRLF / CR-only / LF-only, is always the problem - instead of text files being a joke, and platforms assuming things about them being the problem.