9fans archive / 1998 / 04 / 48 /    prev next

From: Elliott.Hughes@gen... Elliott.Hughes@gen...
Subject: [9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 11:50:15 +0200 (CEST)

> Hello?  Where did everybody go...?

Easter holiday?

> In that case the overhead for 9p now gets quite high given all
> the Twalks.  So how about a uchar length followed by data?  Makes
> sense.

One thing I don't get is why "Fields that contain names are 28-byte
strings (including a terminal NUL (zero) byte)". Why send the zero,
if it's always zero and it's always there? Why not use these 28 bytes
as a sort of persistant fid?

> And another thing, there is enough about Plan9 that the user needs
> to be aware of, might as well add spaces to file names so the DOS
> weenys don't eat your lunch when you do IMAP and CIFS...

Is it really worth it? Who is going to take advantage of it? Nearly all my
files have short names ending .c or .java, and I suspect (as Tom Duff
mentioned) that this will be true for most of us.

I don't know. Is "there are more important things to think about" sufficient
reason not to do something? Maybe I'd have done more and pontificated
less in my time if I hadn't thought like this!

-- 
http://users.ch.genedata.com/~enh/