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Re: DEP 5 and directory/file names with spaces



su, 2009-06-07 kello 00:44 -0400, Andres Mejia kirjoitti:
> The current proposal for DEP 5 has this snippet for the 'Files' field.
> 
> "List of space-separated globbing pathnames (see man 7 glob for more details) 
> indicating files that have the same licence and share copyright holders."
> 
> This doesn't take into account files or directories that may be named with 
> spaces.

That is a very good point. Thanks for bringing it up!

> 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.

I'm afraid I'm opposed to comma-separated values (CSV). That format is
pretty much unused by Debian packaging related tools currently, and we
really don't need more complexity in this area. It also makes it harder
to extract the filename patterns using simple tools. Also, to quote the
Wikipedia page: "No general standard specification for CSV
exists" (regardless of RFC 4180), meaning we'd have to fix on a
particular specification and make sure all libraries used implement that
format.

My own preference would be to encode each pattern using URL encoding:
each pattern shall contain no unencoded spaces. URL encoding would also
allow full generality of encoding, and is well defined and well
supported by all relevant programming languages. Also, in most cases, a
simplistic glob (no spaces, no percent characters) will be identical to
the encoded value. This would keep things much simpler for people who
write the files.

Example:

        Files: foo.c README* user%20manual/*



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