Re: DEP-5 and files with white spaces
Le Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 09:50:09AM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
>
> 1) DEP 5 and directory/file names with spaces
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/06/msg00155.html)
>
> My summary is that the participants were quite divided on whether separating
> the list of files by spaces or by commas. Space-separation took advantage, as
> the resulting list can be pasted directly in a shell. The escaping syntax was
> glob(7) at the time, but it allows patterns that the shell will not expand, so
> the two wildcards * and ? were proposed. My personal feeling is that more
> complete syntax, like allowing shell quotes, did not make it because no
> participant had patience or energy left for moving this forward. But ‘shell
> pastability’ is I think the conclusion.
While reading the DEP again, I realised that our current format is not always
directly pastable to the shell, as the wildcards are allowed to match directory
separators, so that ‘*/Makefile.in’ can match at any depth. There is a small
number of packages using that feature, with Makefile.in in most of the cases.
It looks like that we can not have both conveniences at the same time. I think
that it is one more argument to consider revisiting the current syntax in a
later evolution of the format, but I think that we should accumulate more
experience before that.
Have a nice week-end,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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