the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

jlrp5 · 2011-05-05 14:28:57

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.

wonder · 2011-05-05 14:36:32

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)

jlrp5 · 2011-05-05 14:49:02

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 ".".

wonder · 2011-05-05 15:06:29

works fine for me from firefox and with wget. maybe the windows version doesn't treat it well and renames it

hbekel · 2011-05-05 15:22:32

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.

jlrp5 · 2011-05-05 15:29:06

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.

ewaller · 2011-05-05 16:34:56

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?

schivmeister · 2011-05-05 19:28:43

ewaller wrote:

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.

jlrp5 · 2011-05-06 15:45:37

thanks guys

stryder · 2011-05-14 09:40:25

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.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-05-05 14:28:57

the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#2 2011-05-05 14:36:32

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#3 2011-05-05 14:49:02

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#4 2011-05-05 15:06:29

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#5 2011-05-05 15:22:32

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#6 2011-05-05 15:29:06

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#7 2011-05-05 16:34:56

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#8 2011-05-05 19:28:43

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#9 2011-05-06 15:45:37

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

#10 2011-05-14 09:40:25

Re: the use of forbidden characters such as the colon ":" in package names

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