Re: DEP-5 and files with white spaces
Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 11:01:00AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> Not a solution on its own.
> Actually, I think it's a perfectly workable solution.
>> What about a file named foo" bar' baz?
>>
>> For a worst case what about files with newlines?
> Unless these are part of a test suite on filenames, slap upstream and
> tell them to use sane filenames?
We're basically retracing the previous discussion, and rediscovering why
we left the spec alone.
Formal correctness says that any possible file name should be
representable, at which point filenames with newlines or embedded quote
characters are a theoretical possibility and we would want some sort of
robust solution for all those cases. If we *aren't* going to try to
represent absolutely any possible legal filename exactly, then we're
debating over how much of a technical correctness hole we want to leave,
not over whether we're going to have one. At that point, I think it's
reasonable to ask if we care about going to the work of expanding the spec
to handle filenames with spaces in them without wildcards, as even that is
not a horribly common case. (I realize it's more common for upstreams who
develop on Windows or Mac OS.)
That's how ended up where we are now.
Note that another case that I don't think has been discussed, but which is
probably more common than embedded quote marks, is a filename that's
invalid UTF-8 (straight ISO 8859-1, for example). That's also not
representable in our typical debian/copyright file, and is likely to cause
significant practical problems (such as having the encoding format change
every time the maintainer edits the file, since some editors will try to
"fix" such problems).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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