Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Increasing the filename space (Or: begging for trouble?)

[Christian Thäter]

Hi,

> to the list of accepted filenames by changing the file =tagging-method
> so that the source regexp reads
> 
>     source ^[_=a-zA-ZæøåÆØÅ0-9].*$

unless you use utf-8 or a similar international encoding your repository will 
be unportable, because it depends on the actual used encoding scheme for such 
letters, wich might be diffrent at someone who tries to check it out.
Note: utf-8 is not supported in tla yet.

> Now, my problem seems to be located in the function
> contains_illegal_character (char *filename) in the file
> tla/libarch/invent.c.  Here I've included my suggested modification of
> that function:
> 
> static int
> contains_illegal_character (char * filename)
> {
>   int x;
> 
>   for (x = 0; filename[x]; ++x)
>     if ((filename[x] == '*')
>         || (filename[x] == '?')
>         || (filename[x] == '[')
>         || (filename[x] == ']')
>         || (filename[x] == '\\')
>         || (filename[x] == ' ')
>         || (filename[x] == '\t')
>         /* Suggested removal:
>            || (!char_is_printable (filename[x]))
>         */
>         )
>       return 1;
> 
>   return 0;
> }

I am working on a escaping engine for tla, it will support 'spaces in 
filenames' and other currently invalid characters. I might also be used to 
escape localized characters via unicode escapes (while I am not sure if we 
should support such, this needs to be worked out).
The function above will be changed (or maybe completely removed).

A first review release will be available within the next few days.

in short: having international characters is more problematic than just a crude 
workaround at one place. Usually programming sourcefile names should be 7-bit 
ascii anyways. There is a need for files like documentation and so on. 
Unfortunally tla can't handle that currently and fixing that in the way you 
suggested might break archives/compatibility.

        Christian