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CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

fossil-scm.org

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Re: CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

#3

Post by michaelmior »

> various protocols (HTTP, SMTP, CSV) still "require" CRLF at the end of each line

What would be the benefit to updating legacy protocols to just use NL? You save a handful of bits at the expense of a lot of potential bugs. HTTP/1(.1) is mostly replaced by HTTP/2 and later by now anyway.

Sure, it makes sense not to require CRLF with any new protocols, but it doesn't seem worth updating legacy things.

> Even if an established protocol (HTTP, SMTP, CSV, FTP) technically requires CRLF as a line ending, do not comply.

I'm hoping this is satire. Why intentionally introduce potential bugs for the sake of making a point?

Re: CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

#4

Post by deltaknight »

As an implementation detail, I assume many programs simply ignore the CR character already? Whilst of course many windows programs (and protocols as mentioned) still require CRLF, surely the most efficient way to make something cross-platform if to simply act on the LF part of CRLF, that way it works for both CRLF and LF line ends.

The fact that both CRLF and LF used the same control character in my eyes in a huge bonus for this type of action to actually work. Simply make everything cross platform and start ignoring CR completely. I’m surprised this isn’t mentioned explicitly as a course of action in the article, instead it focuses on making people change their understanding of LF in to NL which is as unnecessary complication that will cause inevitable bikeshedding around this idea.

Re: CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

#5

Post by djha-skin »

> Let's make CRLF one less thing that your grandchildren need to know about or worry about.

The struggle is real, the problem is real. Parents, teach your kids to use .gitattribute files[1]. While you're at it, teach them to hate byte order marks[2].

1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73086622/is-a-gitattribu...

2: https://blog.djhaskin.com/blog/byte-order-marks-must-diemd/

Re: CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

#7

Post by perching_aix »

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?

Re: CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

#8

Post by fweimer »

SMTP https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2821#section-4.1.1....> is pretty clear that the message termination sequence is CR LF . CR LF, not LF . LF, and disagreements in this spot are known to cause problems (include undesirable message injection). But then enough alternative implementations that recognize LF . LF as well are out there, so maybe the original SMTP rules do not matter anymore.
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