On Nov 9, 2006, at 4:21 AM, Martin Ritchie wrote:
On 09/11/06, Steve Vinoski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Nov 8, 2006, at 7:07 PM, Martin Ritchie wrote:
> I don't agree that spaces are that hard to deal with
C'mon, let's be realistic. Ever see any book by Brian Kernighan or
any other UNIX guru that recommends creating pathnames containing
spaces? No, because there's a reason for that. I guarantee you that
pretty much anyone writing a script of any sort that has to deal with
pathnames will get it wrong for pathnames containing spaces, unless
they are explicitly thinking about pathnames containing spaces every
step of the way. Getting all the necessary quoting right, especially
with scripts calling other scripts, is pretty hard.
I'd love to live in a world where Unixes ruled but we are not there
yet. Simply ignoring spaces in path names is what causes "other" tools
and scripts not to handle them correctly. While I'm sure most of us
develop on a Linux box some of us are not that fortunate. We need to
be aware of the issue that spaces cause and try and minimise their
impact. See QPID-68 which will probably affect quite a lot of our
users of our software. Deciding not to have any spaces in our source
tree won't help our users that have spaces in the path to our
checkout. We can't impose path requirements on our users.
I *strongly* agree that our code should handle pathnames containing
spaces -- I've never ever argued to the contrary -- but sticking
spaces into random pathnames in our source tree won't ensure that. If
we want to make sure the code handles pathnames containing spaces,
then we write unit tests and system tests to make sure. Same goes for
I18N and L10N.
For the record, I don't live in a UNIX-only world. On my desk I have
two Macs each running OS X, a RH Linux box which also runs Windows
2000 in a VM, and all around me are numerous flavors of Solaris, HP-
UX, Irix, Tru64, etc. The software I help develop for my employer
runs on embedded systems, mainframes, and pretty much everything in
between.
--steve
> but I agree that
> it should be change. I'm not usually one to create folders with
> spaces. A hazard of using a GUI. If you change it back before the
> morning then the releasesrc build target needs to be updated.
Am changing it now.
Cheers
Martin
thanks,
--steve
>
>
> On 08/11/06, Steve Vinoski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I noticed that in the java subdirectory today, somebody
committed a
>> new directory named "Release Docs" under the doc directory. Let's
>> please change that to "release-docs" or something like that, as
>> pathnames containing spaces are just generally very hard to
deal with
>> in automated tools and such. I'm happy enough to commit the rename
>> myself, but I just wanted to check before doing so to make sure
>> someone isn't counting on the space being there for some reason.
>>
>> thanks,
>> --steve
>>
>
>
> --
> Martin Ritchie
--
Martin Ritchie
