[OS X TeX] i-Installer & Jaguar (10.2) Trivial Fix

[Troy Goodson]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 12:44  AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> On Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, at 02:08 Europe/Amsterdam, Troy Goodson wrote:
>
>>> yet another translation. The result is that Carbon applications see 
>>> colons, and everyone else sees slashes. This can create a 
>>> user-visible schizophrenia in the rare cases of file names 
>>> containing colon characters, which appear to Carbon applications as 
>>> slash characters, but to BSD programs and Cocoa applications as 
>>> colons.
>>
>> Not to start a flame war, but I've always been a little frustrated by 
>> this decision (the part about Cocoa apps seeing colons) because it 
>> means that filenames you see via Finder (which is Carbon) will be 
>> different than filenames you see in Cocoa applications :(
>
> It is not even true as I discovered writing a particular workaround 
> for i-Installer v2. When you have an Open Panel in a pure Cocoa App 
> and you type a name with slashes in it, it is returned to the app with 
> colons, not slashes.
>
> G

But isn't that consistent? Cocoa apps see "/" as the delimiter, so if a 
user wants a file to have a "/" in the filename, the Cocoa application 
must translate this to ":"  (Of course, the user who knows that Cocoa 
apps see "/" as the delimiter might think they should type a ":" to get 
a "/" in a filename, but I guess these users are too smart for their 
own good :)

To clarify, in the paragraph above, when one speaks of "presenting a 
file to the user" they are talking about a file that is already in the 
filesystem and that file is being displayed for the user by a Carbon or 
Cocoa application.

You're talking about the process of naming a file.  Personally, I 
appreciate the functionality you've mentioned.  I expect "/" to be a 
valid character in a filename and, likewise, ";" to be invalid.  When 
an application asks me for a filename, I don't expect to be able to 
enter a path.  I expect to navigate the path and then type the 
filename.  This will, I can imagine, lead to confusion if your 
filesystem is UFS instead of HFS+.  I can come up with some ideas for 
coping with this, but I certainly haven't thought about it as much as I 
hope the people at Apple have.

But this is all off-topic, so I'll try and keep quiet about it from now 
on :)

Troy.


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