Re: Dash in octave-prefs filename

[Rik]

On 11/05/2011 01:10 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On  5-Nov-2011, Rik wrote:
>
> | Would it be okay to change the filename for octave preferences to
> | '.octave_prefs'?  This would be consistent with .octave_hist and
> | .octave_packages.
>
> I like dashes in filenames rather than underscores.  It would be OK to
> be consistent, but what will we have to do to not break things for
> people who are currently using the old name?  How long do we have to
> keep the code that looks for both names?
Has the code been out long enough for there to be much uptake?  The
changeset adding the new preference setting functions was committed on
September 30th.  It's been out just 5 weeks and only on the development
branch of the Mercurial repository.  I think the number of users who have
pulled from Mercurial, compiled from scratch, and then aggressively started
using this new feature is small--perhaps, even small enough that each user
could be individually warned.  Nevertheless, the attached changeset for
review adds a bit of code to automatically transition users to the new
filename.
> | In addition, it gets away from using the dash which is
> | used for input option processing on most UNIX commands.
>
> Is there some way that causes trouble?
Admittedly, they were old UNIX CAD tools, but I've had some programs choke
on anything that wasn't a plain vanilla filename.  This has made me leery
to use anything beyond the set [a-zA-Z0-9_] for filenames.  It is perfectly
possible to use a larger set, but then one has to verify that the selected
character isn't a problem.  One also has to predict that future programs
won't take advantage of the selected character for some new purpose.  I'm
lazy about wanting to test new filename characters on all platforms (UNIX,
Mac, Windows) and I'm not a clairvoyant and can't predict the future. 
Thus, I'm stuck with simple file names.

Cheers,
Rik

prefsfile.cset
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