Re: Need a sponsor/advocate

[David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>]

On Sunday, September 30, 2001 4:48 PM +0200 Erich Schubert 
<erich.schubert@mucl.de> wrote:

> > Description: Translates text files between Mac, DOS, and Unix formats
> >  'eol' contains 4 programs that help you deal with cross-platform text
> > files:

[snip]

> Do you know "recode"?
> recode knows over 200 different character sets and file formats and can
> easily be used for that. So insted of making separate programs, i'd
> suggest using aliases like

[snip]

> Recoding isn't trivial, and your claim "from any format" won't hold for
> sure, as most codeset's cannot be distinguished at all.
> Furthermore it looks like converting to Mac isn't completely done by
> replacing the linefeeds with carriage returns.
> Windows does use a different codepage as dos, afaik!
> Even DOS doesn't always use the same Codepage.
> It usually uses 437 OR 850 though.
> So expect to get bugs over bugs for your package.

Hello,
 First of all, I appreciate the criticism. I've been pondering my eol 
package throughout the week and I've decided it still has merit. It is not 
intended to recode between unicode, ebdic, and ascii, like recode. It's 
merely intended to change out end of lines in a file and make them uniform. 
Recode can't do this.

 On Wednesday I imported a file into CVS that accidentally had mac end of 
line characters (CR). I looked in my CVS repository and half the file had 
unix eols (LF), and the other had mac eols. I tried recode, but it just 
swapped eols--the unix ones became mac ones and the mac ones became unix 
ones. That didn't help me at all. I used eol's "tounix" and it made the 
file uniform.

 So perhaps the problem is I don't have a good description in the package 
header. How about making the EOL more explicit:

Description: Translates text files between Mac, DOS, and Unix EOL formats
 'eol' contains 4 programs that help you deal with cross-platform text
 file end-of-line (EOL) issues:
   - tounix converts a text file into Unix EOL format (eol=lf) from any
   EOL format.
   - tomac converts a text file into Macintosh EOL format (eol=cr)
   from any EOL format.
   - todos converts a text file into DOS EOL format (eol=crlf) from any
   EOL format.
   - towin converts a text file into DOS EOL format (eol=crlf) from any
   EOL format.
 .
 None of these programs will change any characters of the text file.

--On Sunday, September 30, 2001 10:46 PM -0300 Carlos Laviola 
<claviola@debian.org> wrote:
> There's also the ``mtools'' package.

I couldn't find anything in this package to help me. Did I miss something 
(it looks like its just floppy utilities).

--On Monday, October 1, 2001 9:10 AM -0400 Peter S Galbraith 
<GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca> wrote:

> This will clash with an existing package:
>
> $ dpkg -L sysutils | grep todos
> /usr/bin/todos
> /usr/share/man/man1/todos.1.gz

Thanks, I've added a conflict line to my package:
<ftp://ftp.indigita.com/other/david/eol/eol_1.0.2-2_i386.deb>

Thanks to all that responded, (and I still need an advocate/sponsor!)
 David