Re: Support spaces in filenames

[Jos Backus]

    Hello,

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 06:56:31PM +0900, Shigio Yamaguchi wrote:
> I agree this is a weakness of GLOBAL and tabs are much less likely
> to occur in filenames.
 
Thank you.

> 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).

I agree that there is probably no way to avoid this temporary breakage and
that it will be disruptive. I would also argue that any such breakage should
be trivial to fix in most cases where this output is used.

> 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 seems to be a problem mostly confined to the Windows world, as many other
UNIX tools unfortunately don't handle spaces in filenames either and as such
deter developers from using them. That doesn't mean that there would be no
payoff making this change - if nothing else, it will make GLOBAL behave more
correctly on UNIX and in what seems to be a common use case in the Windows
world.

> This is a problem which derives from the initial design of GLOBAL.

Ouch.

> Is it realistic selection to make it a difficulty when the
> data structure of GLOBAL is reviewed in the future?

Yes, I would appreciate it very much if you would take this change into
consideration next time you make changes to GLOBAL's data structures, as this
means that this problem will be solved in a future version. In the meantime
we'll make do ;-)

Thank you for your continued work on GLOBAL.

Arrigato,
-- 
Jos Backus                       _/  _/_/_/      Sunnyvale, CA
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jos at catnook.com        _/_/   _/_/_/          require 'std/disclaimer'