dotnet
.dib files are not handled as text in Azure DevOps repos
When I commit a .dib file to repo in Azure DevOps it cannot display the file on the web interface. It tries to handle it as a binary file. Can I do anything about it?
Notebooks are great and I try to convince my teammates to use them, but my pull request looks like I'm trying to sneak in some binary bloat.
The only workaround I'm aware of at the moment is to use the .ipynb extension. It's not as friendly for diff tools.
We'll likely be adding additional supported file formats in the future.
DIB was already in use as a file extension which is why various things think it is a device independent bitmap.
Can someone reach out to the ADO team to get this fixed? I'm starting to check in a lot of .dib Notebook files into ADO and none of it renders correctly
edit: I think I found where to file a bug to the ADO team. Hoping they fix it...
@jonsequitur - can you confirm why the .dib is used when that extension is historically reserved for "device independent bitmap"? I'd suggest using the ".dnb" or ".idnb".
On Azure DevOps side we:
- do not want to mess up handling of the extensions (handle the image files as non-binary)
- do not want to allow users to control what extensions should be treated as non-binary or vice-versa
- do not want to get into space where the handling of the file will be driven by the contents rather than the extension as that may not work 100% and will consume more resource
So, we'll keep the current handling that is using hardcoded list of extensions that are treated as binary files. We'll not remove the ".dib" extension from that list as it's "device independent bitmap" as already explained above.
We could consider adding support for an alternative file extension for this format.
The decision to use .dib was made early on and we realized there was a file extension conflict only later. We haven't wanted to break backwards compatibility.
Related, but closed: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/dotnet-notebook-dib-files-not-shown/10106469?viewtype=all ...
Let's have some discussions to come up with a new extension - maybe *.pnb, *.pgnb (for PolyGlot NoteBook) which is going to render as text in ADO (and perhaps place a feature request to get them rendered as Notebooks).
