From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] experimental change for devmnt to deal with spaces
From: rog@vitanuova.com
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Date: Wed,  3 Jul 2002 18:52:25 +0100
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nemo:
> BTW, is the UTF8 of 0x00a0 0xa0? I think so, but I'm not sure.

no rune above 127 has the same representation in utf8.  (0xa0 is
represented by [0xc2, 0x80]).

that means your job is a little harder as you have to grow the
messages.

but i really don't think this is in the right place, as it affects
*every* user-level implemented fileserver, and it's quite possible
that a fileserver produces in a file names that have been created
inside it.  (e.g.  think of upas/fs, "create mboxname").

however i still think it shouldn't be too bad if done at the
boundaries of the system, where one is less likely to have such things
going on, and where one is notionally crossing a language boundary
anyway (e.g.  one doesn't expect a Windows filesystem to have files
containing filenames in plan 9 format).

rob:
> Change space!

actually i thought i was on the side of *not* changing space!  space
in plan 9 was always a character that could be used to separate
filenames unconditionally; now it's not, and that change affects many
things.

a few things that are affected:

* filenames of the same length no longer take the same number of
characters.

* {ls | sort -f} no longer works.  (in fact sort probably needs to
understand quoting for its field separators, as probably do several
other tools).

* regexps for matching filenames become much more complex, and
non-determinate, as we don't know which characters were inside or
outside the quotes.  acme right-button semantics can never work
properly on quoted filenames.

* greater potential for visual misidentification of distinct
filenames: i think that it's more difficult to pick out the filenames
in:
	'A few very  ''long file'    names 'in the same  '   place
than in:
	A_few_very__'long_file    names in_the_same__   place
(substituting '_' for whatever the "space" char is), as there's an
immediate indication of which spaces are separators and which are part
of the filenames.

* the fact that spaces run together visually provides great
possibilities for ambiguities in filenames (not that that isn't an
issue with unicode anyway :-])

* echo no longer works reliably as a convenient way of selecting filenames:
e.g.
	% echo *.txt
	x.txt y.txt z.txt
	% ls -l
	--rw-rw-r-- M 32 rog rog 1 Jul  3 18:31 x.txt y.txt
	--rw-rw-r-- M 32 rog rog 1 Jul  3 18:31 z.txt

oh well.

  rog.