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I don't know who "the Austin Group" mentioned in the article are, but how come they "could not find a single use-case for newlines in pathnames besides breaking

I don't know who "the Austin Group" mentioned in the article are, but how come they "could not find a single use-case for newlines in pathnames besides breaking naive scripts" when legitimate use-cases are so easy to find? (And if they're that incompetent, why does the article imply they are worth quoting and listening to?)

gpderetta 2y ago
It is [1] the joint working group that for the last 25+ years has been responsible for both the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification. It emerged after the UNIX wars as a consolidation of the various splintered UNIX standardization efforts (POSIX itself, X/OPEN, OSF, etc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Group
nilamo 2y ago
Is that legitimate? A path name is just a unique identifier for a file, IMO it doesn't make sense to put a whole novel in there. If anything, a giant summary like that should be in the meta tags?
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  In what way is it not legitimate? It's not an accident, bug or data corruption. Someone put it there for a reason, and it benefits their use case. That's as legitimate as it gets.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  That's a core part of the problem: a path name is NOT just a unique identifier for a file. Desktop operating systems and their classical utilities conflate the "unique identifier" and whatever "displayed title" of a file though which the end user interacts with the file. Users care about "titles" or "summaries" of files, not "filesystem identifiers"; as long as the two are conflated, non-technical users will use the identifier to write titles and thus make the file easy to locate in an interactive GUI. Meta tags are not even in the cognitive horizon of most people.
shthed 2y ago
Name one legit use case.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  ... the use case in the parent comment I was replying to. And no I'm not going to copy that here for you to quip "that's not a legitimate use case". Make an effort to make a point and support it with better justification than "because I said so".

gpderetta 2y ago

It is [1] the joint working group that for the last 25+ years has been responsible for both the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification. It emerged after the UNIX wars as a consolidation of the various splintered UNIX standardization efforts (POSIX itself, X/OPEN, OSF, etc). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Group

nilamo 2y ago

Is that legitimate? A path name is just a unique identifier for a file, IMO it doesn't make sense to put a whole novel in there. If anything, a giant summary like that should be in the meta tags?

jodrellblank 2y ago
In what way is it not legitimate? It's not an accident, bug or data corruption. Someone put it there for a reason, and it benefits their use case. That's as legitimate as it gets.
ykonstant 2y ago
That's a core part of the problem: a path name is NOT just a unique identifier for a file. Desktop operating systems and their classical utilities conflate the "unique identifier" and whatever "displayed title" of a file though which the end user interacts with the file. Users care about "titles" or "summaries" of files, not "filesystem identifiers"; as long as the two are conflated, non-technical users will use the identifier to write titles and thus make the file easy to locate in an interactive GUI. Meta tags are not even in the cognitive horizon of most people.

shthed 2y ago

Name one legit use case.

jodrellblank 2y ago
... the use case in the parent comment I was replying to. And no I'm not going to copy that here for you to quip "that's not a legitimate use case". Make an effort to make a point and support it with better justification than "because I said so".