Re: New filesystem/directory API proposal

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Michael Nordman wrote:
>>
>> What happens when some external program generates an invalidly name file
>> in the directory being employed by the WebFS (assuming an impl is doing
>> the obvious thing and directly mapping a native directory to the root of
>> the WebFS)?
>
> There's an easy way around this one -- define the mapping such that there
> aren't any invalid names.

Are you thinking of something like the MS "foo~1" convention?  It's
quite doable, obviously, but it can have unintuitive effects when you
move multiple "difficult" files into and out of a directory, when
names clash with files /actually/ called "foo~1", when you want to
copy a file to another directory without changing its name, when you
want to move "illegal:filename.txt" to "illegal:filename.txt.bak", and
when you're managing the files both in the browser and via the
external program that's created the awkward name.  And I'm sure I'm
missing some cases.

These are all problems that we may have to deal with in order to
support the exception cases, but we should try to make them as far
from the norm as possible.  Let's see what use cases device-oriented
people think we'll be likely before we actually try to design too much
of the solution.

Received on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 04:10:50 UTC