[cvsnt] CVSNT server tries to write non UTF-8 characters infileattr.xml

Arthur Barrett arthur.barrett at march-hare.com
Mon Dec 29 06:51:31 GMT 2008


Erik,

> I would expect problem 2 to be something that the particular 
> CVS client 
> vendor should address, and problem 1 to be the server's issue.

As much as possible we try and make CVSNT work with non-CVSNT clients
just like they would with a similarly configured CVS server.  I suspect
(but need to confirm) that these same filename corrutions (not fileattr)
would occur if the server was running CVS on a Unicode Unix box.

> SmartCVS seems to be using the Java based CVS client library 
> that comes 
> with NetBeans (so I would expect NetBeans to behave badly with UTF-8 
> CVSNT servers as well, but I have not tested that).
> I can't tell which particular version is being used... only that the 
> library org.netbeans.lib.cvsclient is included with the distribution.

OK - that is good to know.

> As stated above, it's not possible to simply replace some binary.
> About reinventing the wheel... it's not really proper to use native 
> libraries or binaries in a cross-platform java app (it breaks 
> the whole concept of Java), so in this particular case it's
inevitable. 

That is what I thought until recently.  SVN is EXTREMELY popular with
Eclipse users (another Java IDE) and the 'standard' SVN client for
Eclipse is a 3GL one (called using JNI from Eclipse).  There is an
experimental pure-java SVN client but it is largely unused.  Since SVN
is so popular with SVN users and the most popular SVN plugin for the
most popular Java IDE is not 'pure java' I now think that Java
programmers just use this argument when it suits them and ignore it when
it doesn't.

> > In SmartCVS 7 under project->Settings on the Text File 
> Encoding tab there are some options you can try.  If you 
> cannot find any setting that works with the server in unicode 
> mode then I can use the SmartCVS client identifier to 
> automatically adjust the CVSNT Server to convert the encoding 
> (bug5479). 
> >   
> 
> I have tried setting the text file encoding to UTF-8 (not 
> proper, as the 
> files themselves more often are stored in iso-8859-1, but it actually 
> varies), and that didn't have any effect on the filename encoding 
> (filenames are still garbled when the server is in Unicode 
> mode), which 
> is what one would expect.

In the prefs I can see two settings:
1) Encoding for local text files
2) Text file encoding in the Repository

Which one did you try?  I can't seem to find any documentation on them
at all.  I am hoping that one or both is really referring to the 'text
filename encoding' rather than the contents.

> The trace logs you requested have been sent to support...

Thanks - it's going to be a couple of weeks before anything further
happens because I'm away from the office until the 12th, and besides all
CVSNT work is on hold until EVS is released.

Thanks,


Arthur


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