782902 - Installers without spaces in the filename

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[white_space]

Hi, the installers for Windows and Mac OS X contain spaces in their filenames. While this may not be problematic for those operating systems, it does become such when dealing with these files on a *nix system.

Keeping in mind that the linux installers of firefox don't have any spaces, I would suggest that all the installers follow similar conventions, for the sake of uniformity and interoperability between different operating systems.

Also most software installers for windows that I have seen, including opera and google chrome, don't have any spaces in the filenames, it simply seems weird that firefox doesn't follow this behaviour.

Comment 1

[Dirk Haar]

Not only the isntallers, but also directories and files created and used by Thudnerbird contain spaces,
e.g. "local folders", which it shouldn't.
Lately I learned that it is very hard to handle such filenames/folders in a script to process my music files, so I replaced any space in any filename in my home directory with an underscore.
Of course, the result was that TB couldn't read my local mail folder.

Please change that irregular behaviour and DO NOT FORGET to announce that in hte change list.
Especially if you use an installation with Linux and Win with a shared mail directory it essential to know that!

Comment 2

[Molly Howell (she/her) (no longer active)]

We're not going to modify Windows and Mac packages for the benefit of Linux or other systems without a much more pressing reason.

I'm not sure what exactly was going on with the more specific complaint about Thunderbird, it's unrelated to the issue this bug was created for, but techniques for making shell scripts properly handle paths containing spaces are well understand and easy to find.