In the gap before Kwalitee shows it's head and we get another CPANTS
update, I thought I'd throw a new one into the ring.
I've twice now hit problems relating to SIGNATURE files.
SPECIFICALLY, I see problems with files that have _mixed_ newline types.
That is, part of the file is unix newlines, parts of it are Win32
newlines. There is a LOT of things that might auto-detect unix or Win32,
but struggle or fail when the file starts as unix, but has Win32
newlines for only part of the file.
In particular, it breaks Module::Signature in platform-sensitive ways,
as the newlines are going to be corrected differently on different
platforms, resulting in abnormal Digest::MD5/SHA/et-al results.
This sort of thing is very tricky to catch and hunt down, I wasted
several hours the first time.
And it catches both good people and bad, with the two modules I've
encountered in real life so far being an Audrey Tang module, and
Digest::SHA itself.
This is the sort of thing that is ideal to include in a mass-testing
regime like Kwalitee.
A mixture of different newlines types in different files is not
necesarily problematic, so the "unix or Win32" applies per-file. It is
only when a file contains a mixture of both that problems seem to occur.
So I'd like to propose the following for inclusion.
Metric: consistent_newlines
The distribution is awarded a point IF for ALL text files within the
distribution EACH file contains EITHER exclusively unix newlines OR
exclusively Win32 newlines.
Adam K
