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I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

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Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thisismyconfig.txt vs this is my config.txt or this_is_my_config.txt Just wondering, what is the readability of this for people who are dyslexic?

Or in my case, people for whom English is a second language, or have low education levels. Saying, "who can't understand..." is arrogant, selfish, and an example of why normal people hate people in the SV echo chamber.

cestmaconfig.txt vs cest ma config.txt vs cest_ma_config.txt

It's the same in any language.

Hugs who hurt you.

I'm also pretty sure most of us in any language use Slack, SMS or other forms of communication where text isn't necessarily presented in a grammatical correct manner and we all figure out what the person is saying.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, we have the 15 character Active Directory limit now with hostnames, and a previous IT administration has imposed a convention that every name had to follow [prod|dev]-[ph|vm]-[service]-[nn]. So basically every production service is prod-vm-owtf-01— you get exactly four characters to actually describe what the machine does. Works great when the service is "jira" or "wiki", but there are a lot that are pretty myst…

Do they at least allow you to set up CNAMEs?

Yes, and for many of the web-serving machines, that's what happens, they're jenkins.example.com or containers.example.com or similar. But often a singular service is backed by hidden worker nodes, databases, whatever else, and it seems silly to give those machines that level of indirection vs just using the hostname as their sole identifier.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GoboLinux symlinks everything into an FHS-ish structure under /System/Index/ so you still have a single place where binaries/libraries/includes/etc. live. (There are also symlinks from /usr/lib, /usr/bin, and others into /System/Index/ for compatibility with programs where those might be hardcoded.)

That actually seems like some low hanging fruit to go on a commit spree correcting code that hard codes paths

GoboLinux is old enough to vote in most countries.

So either those low hanging fruits are higher than they seem, or we're all just a bunch of dwarves.

My bet is on the second option.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#554
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it frees you to pick whatever unmessy solution you want. You can do `configure --prefix=/Program\ Files/ ` if you want.

If I am not writing all of my installation scripts by hand, because that would be really intense, then every folder gets filled with random bits of software. Offering too many similar choices leads to mess. There's nothing fundamentally different between using one or more of these options and using the only option, except that in the second case there isn't any opportunity to make mess. > You can do `configure --pref…

Use Gnu Stow to keep the random bits contained in their own app directory that is symlinked into the /usr/local tree. Then you can manage everything without leaving orphan files behind.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's from back before Windows had a built-in TCP/IP stack? If it were a third-party/optional driver, having files related to it in a path under system32\drivers would make sense.

Back around Win 95 when they added networking it was based off of (IIRC) BSD's TCP stack and related tools. They were an optional 'third party' driver of sorts, but shipped by the first party. I'm not positive about WinNT or Win3.11 (for workgroups?)

I remember adding "trumpet winsock" to Win 3.x back in the day. Says '94 for that, and summer of '93 for NT 3.1 debut:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_Winsock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#556

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

My favorite filename special character bug was when I implemented CD ripping in 2005, and one of our beta testers ripped a CD with a song called "Have You Ever?". My code wasn't prepared to filter out the question mark on Windows.

I just hit the one where an album folder ends in a period. Rsync copies every time because the period is dropped by the filesystem silently. :-/

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#557
post #162

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

> Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space and/or special characters in it. A former co-worker changed his name in our auth system to include an apostrophe, so that whenever we handled names wrong he'd find it.

my test accounts always have emojis + accents + other weird characters.

it keeps everybody on their toes lol.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#558

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

> it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names If you consider spaces “unusual” I would say you haven’t encountered a single average user in your lifetime. Spaces in file-names is the single most common thing people have, outside programming environments. As a x-plat developer, the only platform where I (still) regularly encou…

It's especially funny that it affects Linux so much. Most file systems allow everything except `/` and NULL in file names. Early AT&T UNIX even allowed NULLs! POSIX shells use the IFS variable to perform field splitting, and it defaults to , , and . The choice to perform field splitting by default (particularly with spaces in the default IFS set) has caused no end of headaches for developers and users.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#559
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wherever you want. All of the above, or none. It really is up to you.

That's exactly the problem. This leads to mess. The Windows model of C:\Program Files\ is much better.

But why are many Windows programs under C:\Windows\System32 then, if Windows has only a single model? Why aren't all Steam-provided (for example) games in a single location? Or, if they are, does Windows really have a single model?

Yes, the Linux/POSIX model is confusing, but the split is to segregate administrative domains:

- / and /usr are the domain of the distribution. As a user, you should never install there. The administrative group is root.

- /usr/local is the domain of the machine admin. If the machine is yours to manage, you can install software there. The administrative group is staff.

- /opt/$vendor is the domain of third-party vendors. Each vendor (like Steam, Eclipse, Arduino Studio) can get its own subdirectory and its own administrative user group.

How would you achieve the same on Windows? How do you make sure the Adobe updater can only install new versions of CS, but not surreptitiously install a new (free!) spyware package under C:\Windows? How would you allow certain power users to share one Google Chrome installation, allow each of them to update it, but not let them install additional software system-wide?

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#560

I work on a complex desktop application, and it's been astounding the number of bugs that have appeared over the years triggered by spaces and other unusual characters in file names. If you do anything with subprocesses or path processing, it's absurdly easy to hit in a thousand different ways, over and over again. Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space an…

My Mac is formatted case sensitive when the default is case insensitive. This will also catch a ton of import related bugs. League of legends doesn’t run until I sed files for instance.

I have coworkers on Mac that write node/JS code. Every once in awhile I'd pull down the latest code and it wouldn't run. I'm on Linux.

Sure enough, they had SomeFile and were importing Somefile and it works fine on Mac but not on Linux (which, of course, is what our production servers use). It amazes me that "works fine on my machine" is still a thing when I definitely worked at companies that solved this back in the 2000s. It was solved. It was done. Then devs became enamored with running everything locally. Even dozens of microservices or databases. Even though JS is fairly isolated, you still have NPM packages that need built against the local OS and C/C++ library and compilers, etc. Which also has caused issues in the past.

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