[Monotone-devel] Spaces in filenames, UTF-8, and newlines (was: monotone & CVS import)

[Kevin Smith]

graydon hoare wrote:
> space character is an unfortunate special case becuse some data in
> monotone is whitespace delimited (manifest entries and historical

I'm glad you're addressing this, because monotone absolutely must allow 
spaces in file paths, or I won't be able to use it. Some RCS projects 
are willing to disallow spaces, unfortunately.

> rename certs). so .. hmm. I think manifests would survive introducing
> space as an allowed character since they have exactly 40 characters of
> hex as their first component, and then 2 spaces, then "rest of line" as
> the path name. can't add '\n', but I don't think many files have that.

I would probably consider the first component to be everything up to the 
first space, and the filename everything after that (rather than relying 
on exactly 40 characters). I think \n is the right terminator to use. I 
really like non-binary data files.

> I'd like to get any such breakage out of the way before we get to
> '1.0', after which point I'm going to be much stingier about
> disrupting committed-to formats. since I only invented the rename
> certs 1 release ago, I still feel OK fiddling with them a bit.

Makes sense. I think we should allow UTF-8 filenames, as you mentioned 
in that earlier thread.

Have you already "solved" the cross-platform newline issue? As a 
maintainer of a cross-platform app, this is also an important feature 
for me. I don't really know the right answer, but somehow between the 
tools and some conventions, cross-platform work has to be possible 
(without too much pain).

Kevin