On 14/12/2008, at 2:47 PM, Chris Anderson wrote:
Perhaps your filename scheme could be appended to a slug (based on the
safe-chars) so that sysadmins could still use meaningful file globs to
eg batch rsync .couch files and view directories.
The filename encoder can use any scheme, so yes that is trivial. It
would only be (theoretical) a prefix of the readable chars because of
length constraints. Note that there is no guarantee that slugs would
be unique. I considered punycode, but given that it needs to deal with
case-insensitive FS, slashes, limited length, it was simplest to cut
to the chase and just use the digest.
Regarding your request however, a better way to determine safe-chars
according to the underlying filesystem is required IMO to avoid the
overt roman script-only design. If you think it's essential that *you*
can read the filenames in a terminal, then surely it's essential that
a chinese/russian/greek/swedish/thai etc developer has the same
facility. Otherwise it's not a *design requirement* per se, but rather
a preference.
I'm a pure english speaker myself, but I am about to deploy a couch
system to an asian (government) environment with many millions of
users (with, BTW, a link to CouchDB on every page). In the future I
will have to sell this technology and do technology transfer to local
developers - and that is made very much more difficult with the
current vigorously asserted english-only design decisions because it's
a significant political liability.
Readability / globbableness is also nice when you're trying to figure
out which views use the most space on the filesystem, a common task.
That's why the actual name is in the 'name' file.
Antony Blakey
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CTO, Linkuistics Pty Ltd
Ph: 0438 840 787
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoare
