David Cantrell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 07:01:06PM -0400, num...@deathwyrm.com wrote:
David Cantrell wrote:
Filename character limits are also perfectly sensible. Unix, for
example, doesn't let you use / or NUL in filenames, and for all
practical purposes you shouldn't be using a vast number of other
characters either - \'"()*;?& and so on. Unix will let you shoot
yourself in the foot with those, of course. It'll let you shoot your
admin in the foot too by, eg, putting a space in a filename that one of
his scripts later barfs over.
Certain limits are unavoidable, but allowing more than the basic 26
letters is greatly appreciated by the non-English world.
Remember when VMS was created. Now look to see what other OSes cared
about non-English speakers at the time. Mac OS might have done, I don't
think anything else of any significance did. VMS is at least no more
hateful in this regard than anything else.
When it was created, sure. I was more referring to how little it's
evolved. Admittedly my case was entirely based on the message on this
thread (which I've deleted now and can't particularly be bothered
finding who wrote it) as I don't use VMS myself, but it certainly
sounded hateful.
Even aside from that, just take a look at (to pick a somewhat random
site) ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ and see how many of those filenames wouldn't be
allowed under "alphanumerics (plus _- and $) with 39 character
filenames" yet are perfectly sensible.
Ah, yes, the deliberately pathological case of a heavily Unix-centric
site. Yes, I know what GNU stands for. It's still Unix-centric.
Windows-centric examples would work equally well (as they tend to adore
spaces, punctuation, ~, and other such things even more than Unix) but
finding Windows-centric examples would involve me touching something
Windows-centric, and I'd rather touch a rabid porcupine.
