Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:28:09 +0100

On Wednesday 27 February 2008 22:52, Maren Purves wrote:
> Andrew Johnson wrote:
> > Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> >> Similar remarks apply, BTW, to other EPICS tools. For instance, I
> >> noticed in the past that dbExpand silently ignores the last line of a
> >> dbd include file if it doesn't end in a newline. This has caused
> >> endless grief to Windows users, as editors for Windows generally don't
> >> automatically add a newline at the end.
> >>
> >> If this hasn't already been fixed, I propose to put it on the list of
> >> things to be done before the next release of base. I'd say chances
> >> that people rely on the faulty behaviour are practically zero.
> >
> > I would have no problem in including a fix for that in base, I just
> > can't see how to modify dbStaticLib to do it myself.  Patches from
> > Flex/Antelope experts welcomed.
>
> IMHO they should fix windows rather than that we should break something
> else to accommodate it.

Maren:

I have two questions:

(1) How exactly does 'something else' break if we fix this (which I regard 
as a bug) in dbStaticLib?

(2) Do you really regard it as correct behaviour (and rather think Windows 
is broken) if a tool that processes a text file silently ignores the last 
line whenever it misses a trailing newline? Note that this last line is 
visible in /any/ text editor or text viewer on any platform. It is merely 
a /convention/ that (many, not all) Unix editors automatically add a 
newline when the file is saved.

Andrew:

I will investigate how to do this.

Cheers
Ben

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System