←back to thread

CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished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
Show context
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?

replies(4): >>41831233 #>>41831275 #>>41831592 #>>41833146 #
201984 ◴[13 Oct 24 20:20 UTC] No.41831233[source]▶
What's wrong with trailing newlines?
replies(2): >>41831241 #>>41831375 #
norir ◴[13 Oct 24 20:37 UTC] No.41831375[source]▶
It makes writing parsers more complicated in certain cases because you can't tell without lookahead if a newline character should be treated as a newline or an eof.
replies(1): >>41831718 #
viraptor ◴[13 Oct 24 21:20 UTC] No.41831718[source]▶
What? Which crazy non-binary format makes a distinction between CRLF(EOF) and just (EOF)? Apart from a plain text file, that is.
replies(1): >>41832157 #
nunobrito ◴[13 Oct 24 22:12 UTC] No.41832157[source]▶
I won't mention telnet because you don't use it, but in CSV and similar data it is quite a trouble to normalize the data. So instead of 2 possibilities now we 3 to detect.
replies(2): >>41832526 #>>41832567 #
nightpool ◴[13 Oct 24 23:03 UTC] No.41832526[source]▶
I have never had any issues with this using a standards compliant CSV parser.
replies(1): >>41850490 #
1. nunobrito ◴[15 Oct 24 16:48 UTC] No.41850490{3}[source]▶
Absolutely correct: You never had issues. Other people have built other software that does not use modern CSV libraries. They work just fine today and don't need to update, wouldn't even be possible for most cases in either case.

Please do consider that many software products will not change and they will still be actively used on production environments that you will never have interest about.

replies(1): >>41852209 #
2. nightpool ◴[15 Oct 24 19:27 UTC] No.41852209[source]▶
Well, GP proposed removing the idea of trailing newlines from standard *nix tools entirely, so I think it's fair to ask what shop is going to update their RHEL deployment to upgrade to a version of `cat` or `sed` that doesn't have trailing newlines but can't spend 5 minutes to handle a newline properly in their CSV parser? That doesn't make a lot of sense.

And it was pretty clear from the context of norir's comment that they were not talking about legacy software, they were talking about writing new projects/file formats that used newlines as a separator. Just because you want to shoehorn your legacy projects into this discussion doesn't mean that they fit.