[darcs-users] Re: File name too long

[Peter Simons]

BARBOUR Timothy writes:

 > I thought the components of an ISO date were separated by hyphens (e.g.
 > 2003-10-15).

The hyphens are optional, but you are right nonetheless, that the
format does not really comply to ISO 8601. I'm using the term "ISO
date/time" mostly meaning the ordering of year-month-day etc. IMHO,
using the compact format is alright; it should be easy enough for
anybody to understand intuitively what it denotes.

There is a pretty good description of the ISO standard available at
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html>, by the way. The
document also contains numerous links to other pages concerning this
topic.


 > Can anyone explain why collisions should be a concern ?

Chances are pretty good that 99% of the users will never have a
collision. But if someone does -- and Murphy teaches us that someone
_will_, eventually -- the software should be able to deal with it one
way or another, IMHO.


 > It is inconsistent to advocate an advantage of putting information
 > in the filename as part of a proposal for removing other
 > information (the patch name).

If it weren't for the fact that hashes might collide, I'd say leave
the other information out of the file name as well. The motivation for
adding them is, strictly speaking, not "additional information". At
least on my part. :-)


 > What problems do the long filenames cause ?

Some file systems do not support them. And the longer they get, the
fewer file systems do. For something as universally useful as a
version control tool, I think this is an issue.

Peter