[Banshee-List] Why is filename sanitation so strict?

["John Millikin" <jmillikin gmail com>]

Related to bugs #458224[1], #530690[2], #560664[3]

Banshee is *extremely* conservative when it comes to which characters
are allowed in filenames. When renaming files it disallows many common
characters like exclamation marks and tildes, and when saving album
art disallows almost all characters that are not ASCII alphanumerics.
Is there any reason for this? There are, to my knowledge, no
mainstream filesystems with such a restricted character set.

Of particular concern to me is bug #530690, which prevents the display
of cover art for many albums. I understand that there is work being
done to provide cross-desktop, cross-application access to cached
cover art. However, it will undoubtedly be a long process to reach an
agreement between the various development teams involved. If there
could be a relaxation on the set of restricted characters, even as a
stopgap measure, it would neatly solve the bug for most users.

There are patches in the tracker for bugs #458224 and #530690 already.
They are simple, touching only 2-3 lines. I don't know the timeline
for releasing 1.4.2, but could these patches be accepted in time for
it?

For reference, the set of printable-but-illegal characters in Fat32 (a
superset of Ext3 and HFS illegal characters): " * / : < > ? \ |

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458224
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530690
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560664