User:Mschiff/Slashes in Filenames: Difference between revisions
(New page: This is about KDEs special feature of trying to allow slashes (/) in filenames.) |
(first draft) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
This is about KDEs special feature of trying to allow slashes (/) in filenames. | This is about KDEs special feature of trying to allow slashes (/) in filenames. | ||
Date: 08/01/17 | |||
KDE allows filenames containing a slash (/). | |||
Technically it is not possible to have "/" in filenames because "/" is the filesystem path seperator. | |||
So KDE encodes filenames and saves the filename like in http URL encoding with "%2f" for every "/". | |||
I am convinced that this behavior is a bad idea and brings a lot of trouble. | |||
I will now try to explain why. | |||
* "/" is not an allowed character in filenames of UNIX filesystems | |||
* AFAICT there is no other known OS or Desktop Environment (DE) that allows this | |||
* "%2f" is a valid filename | |||
* Allowing "/" in filenames brings following problems: | |||
** its not possible to have files containing %2f in the name for whatever reason even if escaped to %%2f then it would not be possible to have a file called like %%2f and be presented like that if not escaped ad %%%2f ...and so on | |||
** KDE is not an isolated world. People using it want to communicate to other people and to share files with them. | |||
** sending files with "/" in it to other people will always end up as apparently broken filenames on other systems if its not KDE (Gnome, XFCE, CDE, Windows, OSX). This may damage KDE's reputation in a way that people may think that KDE produces broken file(name)s now and then. | |||
** konqueror lists files and has a location bar. It is possible to access files directly through that location bar. Now if there is a file called "foo/bar" (foo%2fbar on disk) and a directory called foo containing a file called bar: what will be selected if a user enters this in the location bar? what will the user expect to hit? Wouldnt that make eval things possible? The same applies to krunner or the file-dialog | |||
* Krusader shows files as they are on disk (foo%2fbar) | |||
* ark shows files as they are in an archive (foo%2fbar) | |||
* users often use the console to manage files in a batch | |||
* KDE is not compatible with linux coreutils (cp,mv,...) if it decodes and encodes filenames in a way that it will confuse people by the fact that files shown by "ls" look differently than files shown by dolphin or konqueror although there are just plain us-ascii characters being used for the filenames. | |||
related bugreports: | |||
* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51306 | |||
* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100516 | |||
Revision as of 16:02, 17 January 2008
This is about KDEs special feature of trying to allow slashes (/) in filenames.
Date: 08/01/17
KDE allows filenames containing a slash (/). Technically it is not possible to have "/" in filenames because "/" is the filesystem path seperator. So KDE encodes filenames and saves the filename like in http URL encoding with "%2f" for every "/".
I am convinced that this behavior is a bad idea and brings a lot of trouble.
I will now try to explain why.
- "/" is not an allowed character in filenames of UNIX filesystems
- AFAICT there is no other known OS or Desktop Environment (DE) that allows this
- "%2f" is a valid filename
- Allowing "/" in filenames brings following problems:
- its not possible to have files containing %2f in the name for whatever reason even if escaped to %%2f then it would not be possible to have a file called like %%2f and be presented like that if not escaped ad %%%2f ...and so on
- KDE is not an isolated world. People using it want to communicate to other people and to share files with them.
- sending files with "/" in it to other people will always end up as apparently broken filenames on other systems if its not KDE (Gnome, XFCE, CDE, Windows, OSX). This may damage KDE's reputation in a way that people may think that KDE produces broken file(name)s now and then.
- konqueror lists files and has a location bar. It is possible to access files directly through that location bar. Now if there is a file called "foo/bar" (foo%2fbar on disk) and a directory called foo containing a file called bar: what will be selected if a user enters this in the location bar? what will the user expect to hit? Wouldnt that make eval things possible? The same applies to krunner or the file-dialog
- Krusader shows files as they are on disk (foo%2fbar)
- ark shows files as they are in an archive (foo%2fbar)
- users often use the console to manage files in a batch
- KDE is not compatible with linux coreutils (cp,mv,...) if it decodes and encodes filenames in a way that it will confuse people by the fact that files shown by "ls" look differently than files shown by dolphin or konqueror although there are just plain us-ascii characters being used for the filenames.
related bugreports: