Re: Support spaces in filenames

[Shigio Yamaguchi]

Hello,
> But rather than argue this position again I propose that instead we use the
> Tab character to separate the fields. Tabs are much much less likely to occur
> in filenames, in fact in my 20 years of UNIX use I have yet to come across a
> valid use of a Tab character in a filename, whereas the use of spaces seems t
o
> be ubiquitous these days. It would seem to be a good engineering tradeoff to
> support spaces in filenames versus Tabs in filenames, as the former occur
> frequently and the latter I daresay never. This change would greatly increase
> the usability of global, and programmers everywhere would benefit.

I agree this is a weakness of GLOBAL and tabs are much less likely
to occur in filenames.

But changing separator to tabs means the format change without the upward
compatibility. In addtion, we must modify not only GLOBAL itself but also
all the application programs which use global(1).
Are these limitation and works correspond to the yield? I have the doubt
in the necessity of the file name including space. In fact, I have not seen
such path name, at least, in free software projects.

This is a problem which derives from the initial design of GLOBAL.
Is it realistic selection to make it a difficulty when the
data structure of GLOBAL is reviewed in the future?
--
Shigio Yamaguchi <address@hidden> - Tama Communications Corporation
PGP fingerprint: D1CB 0B89 B346 4AB6 5663  C4B6 3CA5 BBB3 57BE DDA3