Re: DEP 5 and directory/file names with spaces

[Andres Mejia <mcitadel@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 07 June 2009 01:47:04 Ben Finney wrote:
> 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?

You may refer to Debian Policy 7.1.

-- 
Regards,
Andres