Those dreaded ^M

[Christian Lynbech <lynbech@daimi.aau.dk>]

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with the fact that MiNT keeps putting ^M into
my files. It is ok that distributions such as MiNT itself is in the standard
atari format, but why oh why can't it leave machine generated files such as GNU
configure generated Makefiles. Ok, I could even live with that, but this
problem fouls any hopes of getting test suites to run, because you typically
would use cmp with a newly generated file, with gets all these ^M's, against a
distributed one which hasn't got any ^M's :-(.

I know about stty -crmod, but then basically everything else, such as ls and
make stops working properly, since they just outputs linefeeds. Either there is
something that I do not know about, or I would like to propose some changes in
MiNTs tty handling.

Enough steam.

I have started to look at the tty code, but I would like to know whether I have
overlooked something, or which approach I should use.

I think the best approach would be to make the tty system check for output
being a terminal, and *only* add carriage returns in that case, i.e. leave
files alone. I know that this isn't exactly atari standards conforming, but
then I'm not interested in that, I would rather have the unix standards. I
think that files tend to live the majority of their life in either domain. So
if your texteditor needs carriage returns, nothing is lost being doeing a sed
commdn on a file once in a while, the carriage returns will not disappear.

One could also make a new output device ala fasttext (say unixtext), and have
that change lines at linefeed, completely ignoring all carriage returns.

Or one could add a new tty mode (something like `igncr') which would handle the
situation probably.


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Christian Lynbech               | Hit the philistines three times over the 
office: R0.32   phone: 5034	| head with the Elisp reference manual.
email: lynbech@daimi.aau.dk	|        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
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