[darcs-users] Re: File name too long

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 12:42:43PM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
> BARBOUR Timothy writes:
>  > 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.

This is basically the issue here.  A neglibible chance or your repository
being corrupted isn't acceptable to me.

> > 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. :-)

On my part, as well.

> > 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.

That's one issue.  The other (and to me almost equally important one) is
that as long as the filenames look human-readable, humans will try to read
them.  If the _darcs/patches directory looks like a bunch of hashes (which
is what it really is, in either case), people will look elsewhere, which is
good, because darcs itself looks elsewhere, so people will more likely be
looking at the data that is actually meaningful.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org