[8]trouble with path names

[titi]

When you name a techtree with an upcase first letter you get problems in cross plattform multiplayer. When you start you get "techtree different on client and server "
 You also get trouble with other commandline options for example when you try to convert the textures with to another format.

How to reproduce:
I used the techtree Sst (starship troupers mod ) from titusgames and tried to make it work with current MG:
http://titusgames.de/news2007.html#otherswork

The first thing I did was trying to convert the textures which gave me several errors. I fixed this temporaray by renaming the techtree to "sst"  instead of "Sst" and all worked.
When this was done I renamed it back to "Sst" and I tried to play with someone using windows. This gave us "techtree different on client and server ". We renamed the techtree again to "sst" instead of "Sst" and the trouble was gone.

[will]

My opinion: megaglest ought to insist that all names are lower-case and ascii.

I'm sure this problem regularly haunted people trying to play Mr War's mods, because he authored stuff on windows and the capitalisation on filenames was varied.

Its tricky to get content-authoring to fix itself, although an updated export script may help.  But perhaps MG could automatically lowercase and strip utf8 filenames when transferring and crcing?

[Omega]

I agree that MegaGlest should insist on names being lowercase and ASCII. When exceptions are needed, that's what the translation files are for (well, works fair enough, anyway).

However, because this could break backwards compatibility with existing mods, I think it should not be changed until a major version number increment. Speaking of which, I'd like to see semantic versioning enforced in our releases. That would make it clear when versions are backwards compatible, which is important for mod support. We can then say that a mod is compatible with MegaGlest 3.x, for example. We can't do this unless we know future versions in the 3.x branch won't break backwards compatibility. Semantic versioning is really just a contract that basically states "changes that aren't backwards compatible will result in major version number increment -- if any other number changes, the release is backwards compatible".

[tomreyn]

Speaking of which, I'd like to see semantic versioning enforced in our releases.

Since this is off-topic here, I've started a separate thread about development news which also discusses semantic versioning.

[andy_5995]

I'm bumping this thread, because, as filux noted, it's related to Case sensitivity for windows too, which titi marked with a priority of 8.

I thought about merging it but wasn't sure.