Re: [whatwg] Intent of the FileSystem API

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Eric Uhrhane <ericu@google.com> wrote:
> What would you suggest for limitations?  If we're requiring
> virtualization, it seems to me that we could be quite liberal.

I'd suggest only the restrictions that are required for the API: no
"", ".", "..", and no filenames containing forward slashes.

Maybe some fairly high filename component limit (NAME_MAX) for sanity;
maybe 4k (in UTF-16).

Maybe disallow nulls; I'm not sure if this is special enough to
actually need to be in this set.

I think the "5000 entries per directory" limitation should also go
away.  Virtualization hides any local directory
limitations--presumably files on disk wouldn't mirror the virtualized
directory structure.

(By the way, I'm not sure from the spec which error code is used for
invalid filenames.  Also--though this section may be irrelevant if you
go with this approach--section 8 says "This section is non-normative."
and then contains normative requirements.)

> Yes, and I'm finding myself agreeing with you, although I've argued
> the other side in the past.  Sometimes you just have to try
> implementing it to figure out what's not going to work.

Sure, I don't think anyone predicted OS-related problems that were
quite that difficult to mask with filename restrictions.  (It feels
like I should have thought of it, too, since I've hit the this issue
several times natively when extracting archives with long
filenames...)

-- 
Glenn Maynard