Hi there,
my wife and I are cooperating on some book-writing and for revision control
purposes we keep all materials under SVN, using mostly linux and occasionally
a Mac or two. Recently she was trying to get checkouts on a laptop that only
runs Windows XP, so she installed TortoiseSVN and used that. Result: fine on
some projects, death in the middle of checkout on others, with a message box
stating without explanation some error about creating a subdirectory.
After a while it dawned on me: the death effect was invariably whenever the
attempt was being made to create a subdirectory named aux. I vaguely
remember from having to work on Windows years ago that you just couldn't use
certain filenames (assigned to physical devices and parsed in an absurd way
ignoring directory path) and maybe 'aux' was one of them. Is this limitation
still with Win/XP in 2004?! I.e. there's NO WAY a program running on Win/XP
can create a subdirectory named 'aux'?! Well, if so, then I think
TortoiseSVN should have a workaround for this absurd Windows XP limitation
(which sends me back to my beloved Linux and Mac in much relief;-) -- say a
list of "known to be absurdly forbidden everywhere" filenames such as 'aux',
'lpt1' (wasn't that another one of those magic names?), etc, and some code to
rename somehow when such a name occurs (say to 'aux_' and so on). [[Or maybe
Windows offers several ways to create directories and TortoiseSVN just
happens to use one that doesn't work for a directory named 'aux' whereas
other equivalent ways might work...?]]
After all, in this case I can and did work around the problem (with svn rm)
because the project is entirely under my control, but what does a Windows
user do if they need to work on a project that's kept under Subversion and
has a lot of subdirectories named 'aux' (quite a reasonable name for a dir to
keep auxiliary stuff I think...) -- if the project admins, maybe catering
mostly to Linux or Mac crowds, aren't willing to perform massive renamings to
work around this weird Windows limitation...?
Anyway, just thought the problem was weird and interesting enough to share it,
it's not as if I need a solution to it myself urgently (if I when I end up
with a windows-only laptop, on a coding sprint or something, on a project
using SVN and with some directories named 'aux' or whatever, I may feel
different, but I think I'll just pray my trusty iBook doesn't let me down;-).
Thanks,
Alex
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Received on Sun Aug 22 16:13:38 2004