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Hi, I've been using Arch Linux for the past 4 years and never looked back. A newlly discovered irritant for me now is I cannot download certain packages for my workplace computer (which has no internet connection) due to the fact that some packages used colons ":" in their filenames. Is there any reason how this was allowed? Let me enumerate a few examples:
rasqal-1:0.9.21-1
redland-1:1.0.12-1
redland-storage-virtuoso-1:1.0.12-1
ntrack-1:13-1
lirc-utils-1:0.9.0-2
why the bending of the rules for these particular packages?
thanks in advance for your replies. I hope it is a typographical error on the part of the packagers.
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that number before : is called epoch and is the old force option but improved. man PKGBUILD and see epoch.
i don't think your download problem is related to this.
Last edited by wonder (2011-05-05 14:38:34)
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thanks for the speedy reply. I meant i could not download it manually using Firefox from the mirror servers, nor could I transfer the files in my var/cache/pacman/pkg directory to my thumb drive due to the naming violation. I googled unix filename forbidden characters, and it comes up listed on Wikipedia as forbidden character. Pacman downloads it fine, it's just that I would have to rename the file manually, and replace the colon with a ".".
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works fine for me from firefox and with wget. maybe the windows version doesn't treat it well and renames it
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename says:
"Unix-like systems are an exception, as the only control character forbidden in file names is the null character, as that is the end-of-string indicator in C. Trivially, Unix also excludes the path separator / from appearing in filenames."
The colon is formally reserved in URIs and should be url-encoded using "%3A", but firefox doesn't seem to mind if a verbatim colon appears in a URI, e.g. this link should work without problems in firefox:
http://ftp.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/mirr … pkg.tar.xz
The problem might be that your thumbdrive is formatted using ntfs or fat, where it would make sense to disallow colons.
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thanks for your replies. Hbekel, yes, i am using a FAT32 thumbdrive (aren't most of them FAT anyway?) to transport the files to and from the office, and tried saving the files directly to the thumbdrive. I figured the people managing the official Arch Linux packages would try avoiding using colons in their package filenames, for compatibility reasons. It's only those packages I listed earlier that used the colon. Like I said, a minor irritant. I use Arch Linux, but the rest of the world, unfortunately, doesn't.
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IMHO, importing packages using a USB drive formatted with FAT/NTFS file systems is a perfectly valid use case. Might I suggest you create a bug report against pacman?
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IMHO, importing packages using a USB drive formatted with FAT/NTFS file systems is a perfectly valid use case. Might I suggest you create a bug report against pacman?
And I do that often as well. Just not since the epoch transition, so I didn't catch this one. Do file a bug report.
I need real, proper pen and paper for this.
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thanks guys
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Couldn't find any related bug report so I filed one: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24270. I find that samba shares, share folders in virtualbox also cannot have these file names.
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