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#1 2007-08-06 14:08:43

tobiasbeil
Member
Registered: 2007-08-06
Posts: 3

Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Hello everybody,

today I read the release announcement of Archlinux 2007.08 on distrowatch.com. See http://distrowatch.com/4394.

I registered immediatelly the Archlinux forum only because I wanted to tell the releasers / developers of Archlinux this here:

Please dont use single quotes "\'" in any of your file names, especially not in the release ISOs.

I use Linux (Gentoo at DesktopPC, Ubuntu at Laptop and Fedora at Work-Laptop) for a very long time and know many Unix-like-OS enthusiasts - friends, relatives and collegues. It's shocking to see that someone from within the Linux/Unix-fraction (and Archlinux belongs to this group) is using one of the most forbidden characters, if not the THE single most taboo'rized character, a Unix-like system could ever face in it's filenames.

The last time I remember I had a single quote filename file on my harddisk was from a legally rather questionable source from P2P networks,
uploaded by one of those MSDOS-Era release groups which include MSDOS-Codepage encoded NFO files, artful ASCII-Magic-on-Dope filenames and other horrible things not to be mentioned here. (There might be women and children around...)

What happend there?
Who is responsible for this and why hasnt he been banned of the dev-team, yet?
Why do you think was it legitimate or even necesarry(?!) to include a single quote in the ISO name?

Please dont get me wrong, Im not as mad as I may sound.
Also, Im not just kidding. Yes, there may be little humor in here,
but the core question is definetely understandable, IMHO.

I'd really like to hear a reasonable and serious answer.

Bye,
Tobi.

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#2 2007-08-06 15:15:14

mOLOk
Member
From: Milan, Italy
Registered: 2005-08-09
Posts: 20
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Blame Douglas Adams.

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#3 2007-08-06 15:18:50

phrakture
Arch Overlord
From: behind you
Registered: 2003-10-29
Posts: 7,879
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Hmm, I don't actually know a reasonable answer. I'm looking through logs and mailing lists, and as far as I can tell, the naming was never ever discussed with the dev team. Can someone explain this? I find that amazingly rude.

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#4 2007-08-06 15:23:13

FeatherMonkey
Member
Registered: 2007-02-26
Posts: 313

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

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#5 2007-08-06 15:33:26

raymano
Member
Registered: 2006-10-13
Posts: 357
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.


FaunOS: Live USB/DVD Linux Distro: http://www.faunos.com

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#6 2007-08-06 15:44:14

juergen
Developer
From: Frankfurt/Germany
Registered: 2005-04-11
Posts: 48
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

tobiasbeil wrote:

Hello everybody,

I use Linux (Gentoo at DesktopPC, Ubuntu at Laptop and Fedora at Work-Laptop) for a very long time and know many Unix-like-OS enthusiasts - friends, relatives and collegues. It's shocking to see that someone from within the Linux/Unix-fraction (and Archlinux belongs to this group) is using one of the most forbidden characters, if not the THE single most taboo'rized character, a Unix-like system could ever face in it's filenames.

"'" is a valid filename character. The only invalid character is the "\0".

Jürgen

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#7 2007-08-06 15:58:50

tobiasbeil
Member
Registered: 2007-08-06
Posts: 3

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

juergen wrote:
tobiasbeil wrote:

Hello everybody,

I use Linux (Gentoo at DesktopPC, Ubuntu at Laptop and Fedora at Work-Laptop) for a very long time and know many Unix-like-OS enthusiasts - friends, relatives and collegues. It's shocking to see that someone from within the Linux/Unix-fraction (and Archlinux belongs to this group) is using one of the most forbidden characters, if not the THE single most taboo'rized character, a Unix-like system could ever face in it's filenames.

"'" is a valid filename character. The only invalid character is the "\0".

Jürgen

Im not too sure about this. As far as I am concerned, most Unix Systems allow any Character except a Slash "/" in their filenames.
But it would be interesting to underline (or correct/falsify) this with a link to an official document, wouldnt it?

EDIT: come to think of it, maybe both is correct: \0 and "/" are not allowed. \0 because of the underlaying C programming (more precisely the String representation in C) and "/" because of the logical separation. However, I'd still welcome an official reference to this.

Last edited by tobiasbeil (2007-08-06 16:02:43)

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#8 2007-08-06 16:17:15

raymano
Member
Registered: 2006-10-13
Posts: 357
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

It all depends on which file system you are talking about. Just saying in *nix or Windows a character is not allowed for a file name is not correct. For this reason, and since you generally don't know what type of a file system a mirror site might use, as a rule of thumb, it is safer not to have a character like the single quote, that has been known to cause problems in some file systems, in a release name.


FaunOS: Live USB/DVD Linux Distro: http://www.faunos.com

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#9 2007-08-06 16:17:15

Ramses de Norre
Member
From: Leuven - Belgium
Registered: 2007-03-27
Posts: 1,289

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

It seems like "\0" resolves to plain "0" here and "/" is rejected.

$ touch test\/test
touch: cannot touch `test/test': No such file or directory
$ touch test\0test
$ ls|grep test
test0test
$

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#10 2007-08-06 16:18:16

neotuli
Lazy Developer
From: London, UK
Registered: 2004-07-06
Posts: 1,204
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

phrakture wrote:

Hmm, I don't actually know a reasonable answer. I'm looking through logs and mailing lists, and as far as I can tell, the naming was never ever discussed with the dev team. Can someone explain this? I find that amazingly rude.

It was posted on the front page since June 25th, that's almost a month and a half ago. If someone genuinely thought there were serious issues with the name, I suspect they would have brought it up in that time. Note however that I'm *not* saying it was OK not to discuss it, just saying I'm very surprised no one said anything if there were such serious issues with it, or such serious issues with the lack of discussion in and of itself.

And for for what little discussion took place, check your logs of #archlinux-dev from the very end of June.


The suggestion box only accepts patches.

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#11 2007-08-06 16:35:55

juergen
Developer
From: Frankfurt/Germany
Registered: 2005-04-11
Posts: 48
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

FTP doesn't handle/convert character encodings (contrary to HTTP). So it's no good idea to post  non-ascii FTP-Links (and assuming a client encoding).

I thought we were using HTTP....

But "'" is ASCII, so every Client should handle the ISO-Filename...

Last edited by juergen (2007-08-06 16:41:23)

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#12 2007-08-06 19:41:53

kth5
Member
Registered: 2004-04-29
Posts: 657
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

All filesystems Linux supports, support that character so why not use it? If you don't know how to use your shell, that's not our problem.


I recognize that while theory and practice are, in theory, the same, they are, in practice, different. -Mark Mitchell

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#13 2007-08-06 20:27:00

tobiasbeil
Member
Registered: 2007-08-06
Posts: 3

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

kth5 wrote:

All filesystems Linux supports, support that character so why not use it? If you don't know how to use your shell, that's not our problem.

Interesting attitude.

I can handle my shells (bash, csh, ksh ...) just fine, thanks for your concerns.

You may better learn some usability principles in return, or else this attitude wont bring you guys too far. ;-)

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#14 2007-08-06 20:38:58

lucke
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Obviously, everything is okay with the attitude presented in the original post.

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#15 2007-08-06 20:48:46

tpowa
Developer
From: Lauingen , Germany
Registered: 2004-04-05
Posts: 2,322

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

The name was chosen, because of the running gag of Don't Panic we had on Linuxtag 2007 with our donation box. Maybe a fault of choosing a ' in the name but i'm sure most people are able to get it or know how to get it.

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#16 2007-08-06 20:55:46

rson451
Member
From: Annapolis, MD USA
Registered: 2007-04-15
Posts: 1,233
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

and if they cant, download duke and do an upgrade. it seriously aint that hard.


archlinux - please read this and this — twice — then ask questions.
--
http://rsontech.net | http://github.com/rson

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#17 2007-08-06 21:02:56

Blind
Member
From: Desert mountain
Registered: 2005-02-06
Posts: 386

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

I agree with lucke.
No matter if it is a fault to have that character or not, your original post was pretty much borderline, tobiasbeil; only being blind on both eyes, one can interpret this as a hint for the future.
Additionally, calling out for throwing someone out of the dev team is as offensive as you can get, and frankly nothing that *you* can call for as having signed up in this forum just to make your point.
People are only human.
Cheers,
Blind

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#18 2007-08-06 21:05:39

nikron
Member
Registered: 2007-05-15
Posts: 130

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Also, I don't think it really matters _that_ much.  Yeah, ' isn't the best character for a file name in linux.  But, it isn't mind bendlingy horrendous, and isn't hard to get around.  I think in this day and age, we can name our files whatever we god damn please.  Sure, we might have to use \, but should really stick to lower case  letters and 4 to 3 letter words?

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#19 2007-08-06 21:14:49

fwojciec
Member
Registered: 2007-05-20
Posts: 1,411

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

I just checked my "Documents" folder and, sure enough, I've found more than 20 files fith "'" in the filename (and I didn't even check the "Pictures" subfolder!).  These files have been on all my computers for many years, I've used them on both Windows and Linux, they were opened, copied, packed and unpacked countless times, and I've never had a single problem with any of them.

Naturally I had no idea that putting an apostrophe in file names was such an unforgivable faux pass.

BTW, earlier today I was also able to download and burn the Don't Panic ISO image without any problems - and in utter ignorance of the possible dangers associated with the use of the apostrophe.

My suggestion is that the next release of Arch be named "Much Ado About Nothing" - in commemoration of this here discussion wink

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#20 2007-08-06 22:13:05

Blind
Member
From: Desert mountain
Registered: 2005-02-06
Posts: 386

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

Yo fwojciec,
can't do that! The spaces.....
big_smile

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#21 2007-08-07 02:36:21

nikron
Member
Registered: 2007-05-15
Posts: 130

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

I vote for 'arch' as our next release name.

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#22 2007-08-07 03:02:52

scarney
Member
From: Wisconsin, US
Registered: 2006-07-11
Posts: 173

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

im voting for 'doh' as the next name for our beloved arch.

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#23 2007-08-07 04:55:09

neotuli
Lazy Developer
From: London, UK
Registered: 2004-07-06
Posts: 1,204
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

So quick poll. Can I please see bug reports for all the software that has choked on this so far? I better see a dozen or I'm locking this thread tomorrow.

or the slightly more abrasive version:
(put your money where your mouth is.. or shut up)


EDIT: whoops, I forgot the important part, all bug reports should have patches attached, since these bugs are clearly of such a serious nature, as the long stream of bug reports so far shows.


The suggestion box only accepts patches.

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#24 2007-08-07 05:06:13

mucknert
Member
From: Berlin // Germany
Registered: 2006-06-27
Posts: 510

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

tobiasbeil wrote:

You may better learn some usability principles in return, or else this attitude wont bring you guys too far. ;-)

Big words for someone who just dropped by, does not even use Arch and makes false claims about valid characters for filenames. Maybe you should first learn how to behave. Usability principles? Give me a break!

Lock now so my awesomeness may stand here forever, unretaliated!


Todays mistakes are tomorrows catastrophes.

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#25 2007-08-07 05:10:23

neotuli
Lazy Developer
From: London, UK
Registered: 2004-07-06
Posts: 1,204
Website

Re: Suggestion for future Archlinux Releases.

oh crap this is getting flameish, locking now.

I still expect to see those bug reports and patches tomorrow, else I'm afraid you've totally failed to make a case for yourself.


The suggestion box only accepts patches.

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