Paul Cochrane wrote:
Ok, the currently targeted platforms (as given in PLATFORMS) are: - Darwin - Linux (various flavours) - OpenBSD - FreeBSD (not actually mentioned, but I've seen mention of it working recently) - Solaris (versions 8--10) - OpenSolaris (basically Solaris10) - Tru64 (I don't know anyone with access to such a machine atm) - Win32 (XP, 2000; cygwin; mingw) (what have I forgotten here?) The minimum requirements for filenames should be: - Any character in the set: a-zA-Z0-9,.-_ - Should we make a rule about multiple dots? - Should there be a maximum length? 1024 chars? 100 chars? 12 chars? I'm sure to have missed something here. I'm just trying to get a feel for what our boundaries are so that they can be codified into a test.
Let's keep the tests for multiple dots. It won't cost us much to standardize on single-dot-per-file, and will improve our portability (those tests that are currently using dots to separate the words in the file name can use underscores instead).
Long filenames, on the other hand are a huge boost to code maintainability. So, we won't put a fixed limit on it unless we absolutely have to. (Though sanity should rule. A 1024 character file name probably means the programmer is trying to use filenames instead of documentation, which is just plain wrong.)
At some point we may have to revisit the characters in filenames, but for now the limited set should be fine. And really, as a standard for the core distribution, the limited set may always be fine.
Allison
