Re: DEP 5 and directory/file names with spaces
Hi all,
I also think that to get the best human-readability, it is important to avoid
escape and quoting characters. Using one comma plus one space as a separator,
this goal is acheived in a very large number of cases. Moreover, this is the
way things are delimited in most debian/control fields. If needed, such lists
can easily be turned into something shell-friendly through a trivial regular
expression. For the very unlikely cases where the file names contain this
separator, I propose to use wildcards (same for file names that would contain
characters that are displayed as line breaks).
So to summarise, for the following file names (one per line), we would have:
a
list of
files,that
contain
commas, or
spaces.
space-separated : a list\ of files,that contain commas,\ or spaces.
comma-separated : a,list of,files\,that,contain,commas\, or,spaces.
url-encoded : a list%20of files%2cthat contain commas%2c%20or spaces.
space-and-commas: a, list of, files,that, contain, commas??or, spaces.
To finish, here is again the example from Lars:
space-separated : foo.c README* user\ manual/*
comma-separated : foo.c,README*,user manual/*
url-encoded : foo.c README* user%20manual/*
space-and-commas: foo.c, README*, user manual/*
If users and developers are expected to sometimes cut-and-paste from
debian/copyright to the command line, then the space-separated version is of
course more useful. Otherwise, it is probably a matter of taste… Personnaly, I
dislike the comma-separated format, which I find too compact.
By the way, I found funny files with OpenGrok:
http://walrus.rave.org/source/search?q=&defs=&refs=&path='*
http://walrus.rave.org/source/search?q=&defs=&refs=&path=%2C*
Unfortunately I could not dig deeper, as “'*' or '?' not allowed as first
character in WildcardQuery”.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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