Re: DEP 5 and directory/file names with spaces

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Andres Mejia <mcitadel@gmail.com> writes:

> I suggest that the Files field use a comma-separated list of globbing
> pathnames instead, else something ugly like 'path/with some spaces/'*
> would have to be used.

Thanks for raising this problem with the current draft. I agree that it
needs to be changed to allow spaces in the patterns.

The one problem I see with the new wording you propose is that it would
make a field like the following have a non-obvious meaning:

    Files: foo, wibble wobble, bar, baz

By your proposed wording, the spaces following the commas are part of
the patterns: the patterns are parsed as ‘foo’, ‘ wibble wobble’,
‘ bar’, and ‘ baz’, the leading spaces included. This is IMO not obvious
and would be very easy to forget.

I would prefer to have a specification that allows the above field to be
parsed as the patterns ‘foo’, ‘wibble wobble’, ‘bar’, and ‘baz’. But
that of course requires a more complex specification for stripping
leading and trailing space from each pattern, and allowing leading and
trailing space if those actually are *intended* as part of the pattern,
and so on.

I'm not sure how to resolve this without making the specification more
hairy. Is there prior art we can refer to?

-- 
 \       “Homer, where are your clothes?” “Uh... dunno.” “You mean Mom |
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Ben Finney