[thelist] cross-platform file names
Luther, Ron
ron.luther at hp.com
Thu Apr 21 08:44:04 CDT 2005
Jeffery To noted:
>>I can see I'm probably not going to win any arguments here,
Hi Jeffery,
Maybe there is a reason for that? ;-)
(I think there is a pretty good chance you could be wrong ... However,
I think that's very dependent upon "local conditions".)
This list encompasses a considerable diversity of folks working on a
wide variety of projects covering a broad range of topics of differing
scope. Some work on hobby sites they need to render in an RTL language.
Some may be the only 'IT' person in a twenty person company needing
to render all of their information in a single language that contains
numerous characters with diacritical marks.
On the other hand, we have some folks here who need to *integrate*
world-wide data originating in a number of different languages and
character sets. There are people here who need the data collected
from their web apps to feed into 'traditional' big-iron corporate
applications and downstream systems. 'Traditional' systems that can
puke, abend, page out support and cause considerable misery and expense
when fed file names containing spaces and data containing non ASCII-7
characters.
Now ... if you are working on a project with a small 'local' scope, or
if you are working with a small organization - you can pretty much do
what you want. You know everyone. You know all of the impacts of your
decision. And you can quickly fix anything that might go wrong.
However, if you are working in a bigger environment where you don't
have control - where you don't comprehend the "big picture" ... and
your 'cutesy' file names and characters take down corporate MRP, Order
Management, or Financial systems ... that company might just decide to
change your first name to "remember" -- as in "Remember To? He _used_
to work here."
I suspect that this difference in perspective (derived, perhaps, from
working in a position with different scope) may be why folks are giving
you such a rough time on this.
>>What happens when we extend the practice of avoiding problematic
>>characters to file names with accented characters? (If I have two French
>>files named "âge" and "âgé", do I rename them to "ge", or "age"?)
As above ... the answer is "it depends". If you work on a small system
that you have complete control over -- nothing happens because you are
aware of and have planned for this input.
OTOH, if your app feeds files and data into 'traditional' systems for
a larger company based in an English speaking country ... you ARE going
to cause other people's systems to break.
And ... generally speaking ... other people don't like that!
>>What about Chinese file names?
Same answer dude ... multibyte character set names and data can wreak havoc
on the folks downstream of you ... and cost your company a considerable pile
of cash and time and meetings to clean it up. In some cases it may be worth
it. In other cases it most definitely is not. YMMV.
It's all about the 'scope'. If you are building an on-line sales site for
the Japanese market, to be managed and administrated in Asia --- then you
are going to need to work with local multibyte character sets. And that's
fine. But when you need to send the data collected back to the 'home
office', (whether that's in Edinburgh, Atlanta, or Berlin), you are going
to need to send that data in a format they can handle ... and that
'acceptable' format is unlikely to be a mixture of Kanji, Big-5, and Katakana.
HTH,
RonL.
(Who has spent QUITE a bit of time over the last two years negotiating
code changes across multiple systems located in multiple time zones to
correct issues causes by 'spaces', 'diactrical characters', and Asian
multibyte character sets. Heck, I'm *still* working on some of this
stuff - and it makes me cranky.)
More information about the thelist
mailing list