Alex Martelli wrote:
> 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
Please complain about that here:
http://www.microsoft.com
> TortoiseSVN should have a workaround for this absurd Windows XP limitation
Just because you don't know why something is like it is it doesn't mean
that it is "absurd".
> (which sends me back to my beloved Linux and Mac in much relief;-) -- say a
And why did you use WinXP again?
> 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...?]]
You know, Subversions command line client also works on Windows. Why
don't you try that? Oh, you already did and it showed the same error
message? How sad!
> After all, in this case I can and did work around the problem (with svn rm)
You know, there are other commands available besides 'svn rm'. I
wouldn't remove those directories (except they're empty anyway - but you
wouldn't do that, I mean why have a folder with nothing in it?). I
simply would rename them: 'svn mv' comes to mind here.
> 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...?
Windows users would simply use the TortoiseSVN repository browser and
rename those folders directly on the repository. And after that, they
would have a talk with the people using other OSs about valid file and
foldernames for _all_ OS.
> 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;-).
yes, I heard that praying is really needed for iBooks.
Stefan
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Received on Sun Aug 22 16:53:42 2004