Re: No more 8-character limit?

On 28/03/10 21:30, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Mar 2010, Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>
>> On 28/03/10 18:28, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
>>> Andy Wokula just uploaded what seems like a useful plugin called
>>> 'motpat'. Months from now, there's no way I'd remember 'motpat'
>>> comes from "create MOTion mappings defined by a PATtern".
>>>
>>> Can't we all agree that the 8-character limit is absurd at this
>>> point? Are there systems that still have trouble with>8?
>>>
>>> To be clear, I'm not picking on his plugin's name in particular --
>>> I've just wondered for a while why this is still part of
>>> :help write-plugin
>>> which states that 8 characters is "to avoid problems on old Windows
>>> systems".
>>>
>>
>> Not only old Windows systems (and, of course, MS-DOS) but also some
>> Dos emulators and/or some filesystems. See doc/vi_diff.txt lines 758
>> sqq, and the help for 'shortname'.
>
> I'm aware that there are tons of legacy/compatibility systems for which
> this causes problems. Are there any systems in common, current use for
> which this causes problems? (Why would people be using Vim in DOS
> emulators?)
>
> To reframe the suggestion: can't this be something that systems with
> those limitations should be expected to deal with -- so that everyone
> else gets the benefit of sensible names?
>
> Even in the standard runtime files, 298 of 1117 '.vim' files have names
> that don't fit into 8.3.
>
> ((
> find ~/hg/vim/runtime -name '?????????*.vim' | wc -l
> vs.
> find ~/hg/vim/runtime -name '*.vim' | wc -l
> ))
>
> It just seems silly to continue to follow this arbitrary restriction
> based on historical systems that: 1. aren't still in common use, and 2.
> already *have* to work around the issue anyway to use the standard set
> of runtime files.
>

Some of these (such as, let's say,
lang/menu_english_united_kingdom.ascii.vim -- no kidding) are only
needed on systems where the 8.3 limitation doesn't apply (in this case
en_GB localized Windows systems). I'm not sure about them all, though.
If you publish a plugin which cannot be used on 8.3 systems, then I
suppose you're free to use any name (though if you decide to use a
6000-character name I guess some people won't be happy ;-) ). In the
general case though, I guess the motto "Be liberal in what you accept,
conservative in what you send" still applies, for maximum portability.

Best regards,
Tony.
--
If you didn't get caught, did you really do it?

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