Re: [Monotone-devel] bug report: windows monotone can't check out files with parentheses in the name

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 11:46:17PM +0100, Thomas Keller wrote:
> Jack Lloyd schrieb:
> >Are you sure it is the parenthesis that is the problem? I had thought
> >that the : character was not allowed in a Windows filename, since it
> >is the seperator between volume name and path. (This seems to be what
> >is said in this MS KB article, as well -
> >http://support.microsoft.com/kb/177506)
> 
> I think its the colon as well. How should monotone handle such 
> platform-specific things in the future? I can think of some:
> 
> a) prevent adding/renaming files to names with "forbidden" characters

The consensus long ago was not to take this route -- it leaves us with
the responsibility of determining up front every forbidden character
sequence on every filesystem ever (you can't make things more
restrictive later, you may outlaw some existing history!), and anyway,
it annoys people.

> b) serve forbidden characters as placeholders (i.e. ':' is converted to 
> '_' aso.) - however especially for source code control this behavior is 
> not appropriate.
> c) at least bail out with some nicer error message (and not with "almost 
> certainly a bug in monotone"), like "The file xyz couldn't be checked 
> out on your system because it contains characters in its name which are 
> invalid on this platform. Consider renaming the file first." or 
> something like that.

See also:
  http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/NonMergeConflicts
  http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/Win32DeviceFiles
  http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/CaseInsensitiveFilesystems
(especially the first).

-- Nathaniel

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