On 28/03/10 21:30, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
On Sun, 28 Mar 2010, Tony Mechelynck wrote:
On 28/03/10 18:28, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
Andy Wokula just uploaded what seems like a useful plugin called
'motpat'. Months from now, there's no way I'd remember 'motpat'
comes from "create MOTion mappings defined by a PATtern".
Can't we all agree that the 8-character limit is absurd at this
point? Are there systems that still have trouble with>8?
To be clear, I'm not picking on his plugin's name in particular --
I've just wondered for a while why this is still part of
:help write-plugin
which states that 8 characters is "to avoid problems on old Windows
systems".
Not only old Windows systems (and, of course, MS-DOS) but also some
Dos emulators and/or some filesystems. See doc/vi_diff.txt lines 758
sqq, and the help for 'shortname'.
I'm aware that there are tons of legacy/compatibility systems for which
this causes problems. Are there any systems in common, current use for
which this causes problems? (Why would people be using Vim in DOS
emulators?)
To reframe the suggestion: can't this be something that systems with
those limitations should be expected to deal with -- so that everyone
else gets the benefit of sensible names?
Even in the standard runtime files, 298 of 1117 '.vim' files have names
that don't fit into 8.3.
((
find ~/hg/vim/runtime -name '?????????*.vim' | wc -l
vs.
find ~/hg/vim/runtime -name '*.vim' | wc -l
))
It just seems silly to continue to follow this arbitrary restriction
based on historical systems that: 1. aren't still in common use, and 2.
already *have* to work around the issue anyway to use the standard set
of runtime files.
Some of these (such as, let's say,
lang/menu_english_united_kingdom.ascii.vim -- no kidding) are only
needed on systems where the 8.3 limitation doesn't apply (in this case
en_GB localized Windows systems). I'm not sure about them all, though.
If you publish a plugin which cannot be used on 8.3 systems, then I
suppose you're free to use any name (though if you decide to use a
6000-character name I guess some people won't be happy ;-) ). In the
general case though, I guess the motto "Be liberal in what you accept,
conservative in what you send" still applies, for maximum portability.
Best regards,
Tony.
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