Supporting backslashes in filenames (was: Re: Launchpad svn/git imports failure causes)

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 17:06 +0100, Martin (gzlist) wrote:
> On 10/09/2010, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> wrote:
> > I think it would also make sense to warn users when they add a file with
> > a name that has a backslash in it that that character isn't supported on
> > all platforms. Supporting backslashes shouldn't mean we can't discourage
> > users from using them.
> This approach of treating some platforms as second-class and
> discouraging non-portable features doesn't really seem to be working
> for symlinks.
The alternative is only allowing only the common subset of features of
the platforms we support. I don't think it should be up to us to decide
whether our users need cross-platformness or particular features; it
should be up to them to decide where that balance is for their project,
but we can help them make an informed decision.

>  Pretty much always the right answer is "don't version
> symlinks if you claim to be a cross-platform project", but instead we
> get things like <https://bugs.launchpad.net/sikuli/+bug/586709> which
> gets turned into a dupe of our bug 81689 rather than getting that
> straight forward advice, then this cute little follow up from antatoly
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/sikuli/+bug/634791> which could be
> paraphrased as "switch to mercurial".
The suggestion to "switch to mercurial" seems pointless and irrelevant.
Mercurial supports symlinks, too. If we didn't support symlinks then
there would be other situations in which users would suggest moving to
Mercurial because Bazaar lacks symlink support.

In the case of symlinks I think we should check out the tree anyway but
warn users that particular files could not be created because they are
symlinks. Flat out refusing to check out the tree as we do at the moment
means that people can't access the branch even if they don't care about
the symlinks.

Cheers,

Jelmer
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