Re: [Evolution] evolution folder layout

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Joe Shaw wrote:
> Tab completion works great for me with files with spaces. 

Good for you.  I don't care.  Naive users will write scripts that don't
handle margin cases like this, and will continue to do so.  There is no
point in going out of your way to make things more complicated.  These
problems abound -- you can blame the user every time they get stung by
them, or you can just avoid them in the first place and make everyone
happy.  This kind of fragile, "blame it on the operator" crap is why
Unix is still the user-hostile environment that it is today.

> I'm not saying that the filenames -should- have spaces (they probably
> shouldn't if for no other reason than it's bad convention with the way the
> UNIX filesystems generally work), but I don't generally buy the argument
> that the command-line isn't up to the task. 

It's theoretically up to the task, sure, and Intercal and Conway's Life
are technically Turing complete.  But realistically, this is one of
those places you just don't want to go.

You can't have "/" or NULL in a file name either.  And having "&" in a
file name tends to be a pretty bad idea.  Just deal with it and move on.
If you want to present pretty names in the UI, then quote them somehow,
either by having a mapping, or with percents or something along those
lines.  But if you push the envelope on the set of characters that are
commonly used in file names, you're going to break *something*, and
really, why bother?  You don't need to.  It doesn't help, it only hurts.

> People realized the need to at least handle this stuff pack in 1995
> when Windows went nuts-o with the spaces.

People don't use find and xargs on Windows.

> What's the point in propagating this argument further?

So that people understand why spaces in file names are a bad idea and
don't suggest it again in the future?

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/