RFC: loosening file name limits

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 08:09:22AM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
> So we have a number of limits on file names.

> must be unicode
> must not contain \\ and various other unportable characters
> must serialise cleanly within our various storage formats

> I think the first constraint is very useful for portability; the
> following is not about that.

> The second constraint can be regarded as bzr being a guardian - which
> just gets in the way sometimes.

> We don't guard against many other user-code portability issues like
> having "README" and "Readme" in a single dir; I think we should get rid
> of the second constraint in favour of a nag/warn system where unportable
> tree layouts are [optionally] warned about but not prohibited.
Yeah, I think this the right way to go.

Even if we decide to keep disallowing the addition of filenames that
contain the second category characters, it would be nice to allow such
filenames to exist in history for the sake of imports from foreign branches 
that do allow them.

Cheers,

Jelmer