Vlad, what are your latest thoughts on this?
Philip Martin wrote:
> "C. Michael Pilato" <cmpilato_at_collab.net> writes:
>
>> Philip Martin wrote:
>>> Philip Martin <philip_at_codematters.co.uk> writes:
>>>
>>>> ordinary non-escape character. In the past using an svn:externals
>>>> like "a\b URL" would produce a directory called "a\b" (that's a
>>>> 3-character name) while a quick test indicates that it now appears to
>>>> create a directory called "ab". To get "a\b" the svn:externals needs
>>>> to be changed to "a\\b URL". I don't know if anyone is using such
>>>> names in svn:externals, and I don't think they would not work on
>>>> Windows, but change could break existing working copies and there
>>> Typo: I meant to write "I don't think they would work on Windows" but
>>> it now occurs to me that it might create a directory "b" in a
>>> directory "a". Perhaps somebody with a Windows machine could try it?
>> Yes, using a local directory "a\b" in Windows causes Subversion to create
>> directories "a" and "a\b", with the "a\b" as the external working copy.
>
> So it's possible that Windows users are using this pattern.
>
>> By way of a solution, I was *going* to suggest that '\' be *only* allowed to
>> escape the quotation mark character. That would mean recognizing as magical
>> only the sequence '\"'. But since you can't have a quotation mark in the
>> name of a directory on Windows (and it's highly unlikely that someone would
>> want to have such in Unix, either) we can reasonably assume that for a
>> sequence like 'foo\"bar' the user couldn't really have meant that he/she
>> wanted to flesh out some external in some subdir named '"bar'. But then, if
>> we've gotten as far as to assume that users don't want quotation marks in
>> their path names, why would we need an escape mechanism for the quotation
>> mark at all? :-\
>
> I don't mind whether this change is made or not, but if we do make the
> change then we need to document it--in CHANGES at least. We need to
> explain which svn:externals will get broken, how to fix them, and how
> it's not possible to be compatible with both old and new clients.
--
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
Received on 2008-10-21 19:21:36 CEST