Re: [Evolution-hackers] Re: [linux-cifs-client] cifs mounted home directory problems

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 22:31 +0000, Kenneth MacDonald wrote:
> I'm Cc'ing this to the evolution-hackers list in case anyone thinks this
> is important enough from the application side.
Well my initial reaction is "not really".  An application using a filesystem has to rely on a certain set of semantics, and i believe we're just relying on what a posixish filesystem should provide.    Otherwise we're going to have to use lowest common demoninator - e.g. 8.3 dos filenames with no permissions.  That sounds practical to me!

It isn't something that can very usefully be made a configure switch since it is part of the run-time environment.  If you just want to patch it yourself you can safely make e_filename_make_safe substitute any other characters you want.  Changing it in the main codebase is trickier since it affects finding existing state files in users installed environments, and i don't really want to have to add all this ugly workaround/fallback code for this.

Are colons the only character winblows uses itself?  What about multiple full stops? etc.

> >>>>> "Steve" == Steve French <smfrench austin rr com> writes:
>
>     >> The actual path is this: \.camel_certs\ba:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa etc.
>
>     Steve> Arrgggghhh.  ':' is an invalid character in a cifs
>     Steve> filename.  With one excpetion - presumably it could
>     Steve> indicate a data stream (which Samba 3 would not support in
>     Steve> any case) - in which case file file /.camel/ba would need
>     Steve> to exist for the stream name after the : to make sense :)
>
>     Steve> Presumably this is not some cross platform app that has
>     Steve> some friendly configure option to work around illegal
>     Steve> characters in file names right ...
>
> It's Novell's Evolution email (groupware) client.  It creates lots of
> files with : in the name.  It seems it turns /'s into _'s as I have
> lots of
> ~/evolution/config/et-expanded-imap:__username hostname_mailbox_folder
> type filenames.
>
> I found bug http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16016 closed a
> couple of years ago with a "it's a filesystem problem".
>
> It seems the filename is sanitised by
> gal/util/e-util.c:e_filename_make_safe(), which leaves colons in.  I
> haven't dug deep enough to know whether it would be easy or hard to
> migrate to filenames without colons.
>
> The majority of our users home directories are on Windows servers so
> "fixing" samba isn't sufficient for us unfortunately.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kenny.

--

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> "Ride, Work, Sleep. Beer." Novell's Evolution and Free Software Developer