[Duplicity-talk] Colons in the file names causing problems

[Olivier Croquette]

Hi!

I am using duplicity on MacOS X since several months now. Back then, 
when writing my scripts, I was forced to use the option 
"--short-filenames" when backing up to my NAS drive, otherwise it 
wouldn't work. I didn't try to unterstand back then, but I just did.

The problem is that without "--short-file-names", duplicity creates 
files with colons in their names. The colon is a reserved char in the 
MacOS X filesystems:


$ touch duplicity-full.2005-03-05T19:40:45-07:00.vol9.difftar.gz
touch: duplicity-full.2005-03-05T19:40:45-07:00.vol9.difftar.gz: File 
name too long

I replace then the ":" by "-":

$ touch duplicity-full.2005-03-05T19-40-45-07-00.vol9.difftar.gz
$ ls duplicity-full.2005-03-05T19-40-45-07-00.vol9.difftar.gz
duplicity-full.2005-03-05T19-40-45-07-00.vol9.difftar.gz

No problem!

After a short test, it seems that ":" is a reserved char on Windows too.

--short-filenames is a valid workaround, but has the big drawback that 
filenames are not human-readable anymore.

It would be great to have a way to avoid the colons in the filenames. I 
see at least 2 alternatives:

1. an explicit option, like there is "--short-file-names", ie. 
"--portable-file-names"

or:

2. make the format without colons the default

I can start to write a patch, but I would like to have your opinion on 
1. and 2. I would personnaly prefer 2. if we can make it backward 
compatible. What do you think?

Best regards

Olivier