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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory
From: |
Jason McCarty |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory |
Date: |
Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:56:03 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.3.28i |
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Jason" == Jason McCarty <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Jason> Why would I encode ? as anything other than 0x3F? And why
> Jason> would I complain if arch gave me back exactly that?
>
> ROTFLSHIPIMP! I couldn't have asked for a better straight line!
>
> You see (well, actually I suppose you don't :-( ), your system
> substituted Unicode 003F for Unicode 0109, providing an apt example.
I don't get it. I expected mutt to encode the question mark as 0x3F, and
AFAICT it did. Unicode doesn't even enter the picture, just ASCII.
Admittedly I know very little about unicode and encoding, but that at
least is what hexdump tells me. On a side note, why does unicode have
its own question mark? I thought it incorporated ascii as a subset.
> Fortunately, the difference between ? and ? is immediately evident to
> my eye, so the bug was localized without trouble.
>
> Now, what is fairly likely to happen on sophisticated systems is that
> that character will be translated into a non-Unicode "native" encoding
> of the _same_ character but different bytes, and any references to
> that filename embedded in file content (eg, Makefiles) will fail to
> match. Arch will very precisely replicate that mistake, and transmit
> it to other systems, where it may randomly start working again! Or
> randomly break in a different fashion.
That sounds very broken. If a system understands unicode, why not
preserve every character with its original coding in the filename?
Translating filenames is just asking for trouble, and will break more
than arch.
> And it will be just as impossible to see on screen as the difference
> between a SPACE and a NO-BREAK SPACE, unless you know what to look for
> and deliberately prevent your system from being "helpful".
I can do without the kind of "help" that breaks things behind my back :-)
> >> The only interesting restrictions are on ASCII characters,
> >> namely, the space. (Which is a bloody stupid thing to have in
> >> a file name; all the systems that support that also know about
> >> NO-BREAK SPACE.)
>
> Jason> Bah, space is a perfectly acceptable character in
> Jason> filenames.
>
> That's simply false. Even on systems that provide for it, there are
> many contexts where things break; for example, constructs like
> "less `which baseball.bat`" will necessarily fail if 'baseball.bat'
> lives in 'C:\Program Files'. Now suppose 'baseball.bat' lives in
> 'C:\Program Files'. You and the shell can both Just DTRT. No?
Quoting is my panacea:
less "`which baseball.bat`"
or in zsh,
less =baseball.bat
That's rarely an issue for me anyway, as completion deals with spaces
fine, and zsh's globbing appears to be smart enough to quote/escape when
it needs to.
I suppose foo bar would eventually be acceptable if the shell
supported it, but it seems unnecessary, since spaces work for me _now_.
> So it is perfectly _unnecessary_.
>
> N.B. The user interface conventions that would provide convenient ways
> to enter NBSP in filename contexts are left as an exercise.
The ampersand and semicolon are just as problematic as the space --
if the shell supports that transparently, it can just as easily support
spaces.
Jason
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, (continued)
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, MJ Ray, 2003/09/24
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Jason McCarty, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Mark A. Flacy, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Jason McCarty, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory,
Jason McCarty <=
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Jason McCarty, 2003/09/26
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2003/09/26
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Tom Lord, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Jan Hudec, 2003/09/25
- [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Miles Bader, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Jan Hudec, 2003/09/25
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Dustin Sallings, 2003/09/24
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Robert Anderson, 2003/09/24
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: {arch} directory, Dustin Sallings, 2003/09/24