Re: [Monotone-devel] Filesystem normalisation

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Derek Scherger <address@hidden> wrote:
> I don't think args_to_paths is the right place to make this change though.
> That function only deals with paths on the command line and you may just as
> well get a bad path from a revision committed by someone else on a system
> that is case sensitive or doesn't have whatever filesystem restrictions that
> your system does.

This isn't about bad paths, just about figuring out which actual path
is meant when a user gives us some string.  As such, it doesn't
actually belong in args_to_paths, but it does belong in
file_path_from_external (or whatever the exact name is), which is the
code that's actually responsible for taking user-provided strings and
turning them into well-formed internal paths.  (args_to_paths is just
a thin wrapper around it.)

There are other issues with filenames that collide on some systems and
not on others, but this isn't about that in particular; even if we get
better tools for handling such cases, we still want to prevent them
from arising accidentally, and that's what this code is supposed to
do.  (Plus you can't solve the hard problems without the primitive
"hey OS what path do *you* think this refers to?" operation, and so
this gets us closer by giving us code to that on at least OS X.)

By all means, Peter, send a patch.

-- Nathaniel