cbagger01
Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
 |
Posted: April 18 2005,22:36 |
 |
My opinion is this:
Rewriting everything in the distro to accept filenames with spaces is counterproductive.
However, in this situation we are dealing with a problem caused by "helpful" Microsoft tools. For example, If I create a MSWord document with the first line of the document being a title like "How to Fish" and then push the Save button, MSOffice will automatically save the file as "How to Fish.doc". This is why spaces are so prevalent in these documents. I imagine that this is also true for XLS and PPT docs but I am not sure.
Since the purpose of these scripts is to view/convert Microsoft Office docuements, I think that it is reasonable for them to handle the filenames with spaces because otherwise a large percentage of the documents that are fed into the script will fail the script.
To give a similar example, recently a topic was discussed about how to use emelfm / scripts to transcode an *.mp3 file into a new file with a different bitrate. Some nice ideas were proposed on how to accomplish this. One of my suggestions was to make sure that the script can handle filenames with spaces. Why? Because many audio CD to mp3 ripper programs will automatically tag the mp3 filename with the songname that is pulled down from an Internet database and these song names contain spaces in them.
So I think that it is appropriate in this case, but let it not become a slippery slope for the rest of the distro. This is a linux distro, not a windows os, so we have to draw the line somewhere.
FYI, if you want a chuckle, read up on some of the problems that win32 developers have. Many of their programs ALSO have problems with spaces for the very same reason but they have no choice if they wish to use it as their target platform.
|
.
DSL Market ,
Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic
