On 27 March 2012 22:08, Eric Niebler <eric@boostpro.com> wrote:
Our current guidelines[1] say filenames should not exceed 31 characters. This was recently brought to my attention by a bug[2] from someone who actually cares because he uses the ODS-2 filesystem on OpenVMS. On a lark, I hacked the inspect tool to check for too-long filenames and lo! found a bazillion. Most (but not all) violations are from doc files auto-generated by doxygen and docbook, but which nevertheless go out with the boost distribution and so should conform. (Right?)
So, should we care? Considering that we have little control(?) over how doxygen and docbook generate their files? I have fixed the bug in question, but it feels like a token effort. Should we just drop support for niche filesystems like ODS-2, and close all future bugs "won't fix"?
It is different for source and documentation files, because documentation files aren't going to break a build.