Arch Linux

niqingliang2003

Member

Registered: 2010-06-23

Posts: 24

can we drop ':' (colon) in the package names?

I'm using winows wsl2, and need intercommunication between windows/linux.

the NTFS does not support ':' in the file name, when I downloaded package in wsl2 and save it in the ntfs disk, the ':' in the file name will be converted into unicode ':', whose face is same as 0x3A, but not is 0x3A.

I know the Linux support almost all chars in file name, which is good at implementation, but is not so good when maintenancing if mirror repo files on NTFS.

so my question is: can we drop ':' in package name?
and What's the root cause make us using ':' in package name?

Thanks!

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: can we drop ':' (colon) in the package names?

It can't be dropped without completely breaking Arch's version numbering...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#epoch

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,192

Re: can we drop ':' (colon) in the package names?

If you need a mirror on ntfs I'd suggest you use a web server or fuse fs that internally replaces the colon with the symbol used for ntfs storage.

Last edited by progandy (2022-06-25 12:05:20)

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seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,175

Re: can we drop ':' (colon) in the package names?

the NTFS does not support ':' in the file name

Ftr, that's factually incorrect: NTFS does support ":" in filenames.
Windows doesn't support it on any filesystem.

ntfs-3g has a parameter to limit the permitted filenames, no idea about ntfs3 atm.

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