Short filenames and patch (was Re: Lots of heat, little light. (was: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes)

[Richard Michael Todd]

xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>>[...] my next release of the ACS will be in the form of shar files. As an 
>>added bonus, all of the filenames will be under 14 characters in this
>>one.

>As a newbie to one of the systems that causes this concern, I note that
>this isn't good enough.  If you want to be able to issue patch files
>that work with "patch", you have to hold the file names down to 9 or fewer
>characters so that the ".orig" extensions patch creates are respected,
>rather than lost, making the original have the same name as, and therefore
>clobber/be clobbered by the patched version.

Uh, what version of patch are you running?  On my system (which is cursed with
the System V Short Filenames From Hell), patch is smart enough to not try to
use ".orig" as the extension for the original file; instead it uses tilde.
It also uses "#" as the suffix for the reject files instead of ".rej".  Hence
you only need restrict yourself to 13-character filenames.  It probably would 
be polite to restrict it slightly further, to 12 chars, in case the user wants
to keep his source under RCS or SCCS, which add 2 chars to the filename (",v" 
at the end for RCS, "s." at the beginning for SCCS).  Still, one hardly needs
to be so restrictive as to limit oneself to 9-character names.  
-- 
Richard Todd   rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us  or  rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu