Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 19:10:11 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> To: Ed Maste <emaste@freebsd.org> Cc: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@freebsd.org>, src-committers <src-committers@freebsd.org>, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, svn-src-head@freebsd.org Subject: Re: svn commit: r345138 - head/share/man/man9 Message-ID: <201903150210.x2F2ABwZ027877@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> In-Reply-To: <CAPyFy2CEbKMNVUJ6_mthfq3QL6tq5V0jjoZ01eX82-2kwqLFkQ@mail.gmail.com>
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> On Thu, 14 Mar 2019 at 14:55, Rodney W. Grimes > <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote: > > > > We should of documented what the decision process and criteria was > > that lead to the decission to uuencode the files. > > Doing some archaeology, the first instance of a uuencoded file I can > find is r1796, "Got rid of a couple of binary files by uuencoding. 49 > more to go." There's no explanation of why the change was made. > Evidence suggests that in 1994 it was just accepted as impossible or > not permitted to have binary files in the tree, but this has not been > the case for quite some time. > > > Thus we could easily revist that criteria, see how much of it no > > longer applies, possible add counter criteria, and change this > > decision, with it documented as to why it changed. > > With none of this documented anywhere I'm going to rely on oral > history from you, phk, or other FreeBSD committers active in the mid > 90s to provide guidance on what we can revisit and what to check if it > no longer applies. > > The reason not to do it is uuencoding adds about a 40% space penalty, > adds to the build time (to uudecode), and makes changes harder to > review. In my mind dropping the unnecessary uuencoding is similar to > dropping build-time patching of files in the source tree (another > workaround we used to have for limitations of our older VCS). I think I covered all the above in other replies. > > As is this is just another semi documented project guideline change, > > I believe there are more than just the firmware files that this > > change needs noted on. > > Yes, we should look at the other cases where we unnecessarily uuencode > things. I'm not quite sure where we would document high level things > like this though, do you have a suggestion? I could see a case for > somewhat similra topics (e.g. 7-bit ASCII/UTF-8/ISO-8859 guidance) > fitting into style.9, but I'm not sure this one does. I think the committers guide, which needs a revamp. That should also cover the 7-bit/... > > We should also note that if they are already in uuencode state > > to leave them in uuencode state, or do we intened to convert > > them on next commit, or ??? > > Good point, converting existing .uu files to binary is just > unnecessary churn and is not recommended. If someone is going to make > a change it can be done with the next update. Covered this in my reply to Warners reply. I think we also need to look at how this might affect vendor imported stuff, is there some if it that was .uu'ed before import? -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@freebsd.org
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