On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:53:21 +0100 Martijn Coppoolse <li...@martijn.coppoolse.com> wrote:
> Why is that a bad practice? Because there's programs (like Fossil) > that won't let you work with them? The first three hits on Google with the query "using brackets in filenames" gives: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/123577 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqldataaccess/thread/f0de2e77-aa54-4d60-be4f-fe95e80405f1/ http://www.vistax64.com/powershell/13575-square-brackets-file-names-unexpected-results.html all speaking about problems on Windows. > I reckon you don't hear so much people complain about spaces in tags > because it *isn't* a more severe limitation than disallowing > (otherwise perfectly valid) characters in file names. Don't forget that Fossi is "Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management" and not tool to cater all kinds of files containing funky characters you have in your OS. Any, there is valid reason why programmers (who use "software configuration management") and are regular users of shells, avoid those characters where naming their source code filenames. Even having spaces is cumbersome, since such files have to be quoted. > Programmers have been circumventing lack of spaces in identifiers for > ages, by using underscores, dashes, or by playing on capitalization. Right. > Filenames, on the other hand, are often pre-existing, and you don't > always have the luxury of picking and choosing, since they are not > always created by you; worse, sometimes you don't even have the > possibility of imposing limitations on the characters used. What do you mean 'pre-existing'? Software is created by you. Can you show me some sotware project using names with such funky characters? > We've already seen that someone who wants to store OOXML files in a > 'diff'-able way, will have to jump through extra hoops to get the > "[Content-Types].xml" file into fossil. OOXML files are 'binaries', not diff-able and therefore not suitable for 'software configuration management'. > I also run into this issue every now and then, because someone in our > office once long ago decided to timestamp historical versions with the > time and dates between square brackets. First of all educate people how to name files and/or then write simple script to batch rename those files before checking them into fossil. > Our office's current VCS (PVCS/Serena ChangeMan) has no trouble at > all with [ and ], but then we routinely use the GUI interface. I > haven't used their command line interface extensively, so I don't > know how it fares then. Then again, it's on Windows, and AFAIK [ and > ] have no special meaning for cmd.exe -- certainly not if you quote > the file names (which is a good idea anyway, since spaces do occur > from time to time). Well, I do understand *you* have issues using Fossil, but those are coming from the fact that: 1) your choise of character set used in naming the files is the one which creates problems with the tools/applications (see the links above) 2) your filetypes (OOXML) are binaries and are supposed to be saved as such since it's not possible to diff & merge them 3) Fossil is meant for 'software configuration management' and if you have desire to abuse it (as I do), then be ready to take into consideration its design choices which are in accordance with its desired functionality and/or usage. As far as I'm concerned, having ability to select individual branches for push/pull and having some sort of roolback to quickly repair from accidental check-in mistakes, would bring much more to Fossil, imho. Otoh, as Richard wrote & Steve pointed out, if handling 3 lines of code if( c=='\\' || c=='*' || c=='[' || c==']' || c=='?' ){ return 0; } is such a problem for you to adopt a Fossil, then I might say that you do not have enough experience with (D)VCS in general to be able to appreciate everything which Fossil does so superbly. Otoh, you can try Git/Mercurial/Bazaar/Monotone if you believe that this feature is critical for you & your team. Sincerely, Gour -- All living bodies subsist on food grains, which are produced from rains. Rains are produced by performance of yajña [sacrifice], and yajña is born of prescribed duties. http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810
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