On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Stephan Beal<[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Mark Janssen <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Hmmm for [] VMS comes to mind. >> So fossil takes the common denominator for file names on all >> platforms? > > It sounds that way. > >> >> Although that's certainly good for portability of the >> repos, it does limit the artifact names you can use. Renaming the >> artifacts to a name which is allowed, is not always an option. Perhaps >> a warning would be more appropriate? > > It's a tough philosophical question for fossil. What is it to do if it tries > to extract an artifact and cannot? It cannot know (without guessing, based > on the combination of current platform and underlying filesystem type) that > the problem is related to invalid characters. And even if it does determine > that the filename is invalid, what could it possibly do? It cannot extract > the file and it cannot rename an artifact (they're immutable). > > i don't see any way for fossil to do this, other than blatantly disallowing > any questionable the characters. > > Imagine that you've checked in a file named "DoesThisWork?", and that works > fine on your *nix box. Now someone with Windows tries to check it out and > cannot get that file because his OS won't let a file with "?" be > opened/created. Now the data is locked into fossil and cannot be taken out > without: > > a) using a platform which supports "?" > b) downloading the file individually from the repo web interface (easy if > it's a text file, not so easy for binary). The ZIP file solution is not > helpful here unless your ZIP browser also allows you to rename files inside > the zip or rename them upon extraction. > > While i agree that it's sub-optimal, i don't see any other realistic > behaviour for fossil here. > > -- > ----- stephan beal > http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/ >
The options you sketched above are indeed the only ones that will prevent you from getting into a situation where you cannot checkout a file without renaming it. However in cases like that I usually prefer tools which will allow you to shoot yourself in the foot if you know what you are doing. (and alert you in that case). So another option would be to allow checking in anything which can be a valid file on the current platform (and warn about tricky characters). And provide means to extra an artifact to a different name if required. This would mean that a fossil open on a different platform results in a working tree which differs from the revision in the repository, which is not necessarily a bad thing (for me). I am curious how other programs handle situations like this (git, subversion, scp etc.) Mark _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
