Re: [gentoo-pms] [PATCH] Make it clear that PMs are allowed to handle 'invalid' names.

[Michał Górny]

On Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:24:40 -0700
Brian Harring <ferringb@×××××.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 12:41:06AM +0200, Micha?? G??rny wrote:
> > ---
> >  names.tex | 6 ++++--
> >  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> >
> > diff --git a/names.tex b/names.tex
> > index decc8f4..5a3866f 100644
> > --- a/names.tex
> > +++ b/names.tex
> > @@ -2,8 +2,10 @@
> >
> >  \section{Restrictions upon Names}
> >
> > -No name may be empty. Package managers must not impose fixed upper
> > boundaries upon the length of any -name. A package manager should
> > indicate or reject any name that is invalid according to these
> > rules. +No name may be empty. Package managers must not impose
> > fixed upper +boundaries upon the length of any name. A package
> > manager should +indicate or reject any name that is invalid
> > according to these rules. +Package managers are allowed to accept
> > names not following those rules.
>
> "Here's some rules.  You must abide by them.  Or you can ignore them."

That's wording ulm suggested, mine was more liberal.

The idea is that it is enough to *warn* about them but if package
manager *can* handle them, it should.

> Offhand, and frankly I'm kind of pissed I had to even do this legwork
> because your noisy fucking ass couldn't be bothered to do the
> the necessary legwork looking at sources (god forbid rather
> than chattering like a poop-flinging monkey, someone fire up a term
> and go grep'ing and reading sources); right now, changing the rule
> that way means that a package name of 'diffball-1' would break on
> portage, pkgcore, and paludis.  In other words, as has been said,
> all current versions, and likely versions from years ago, *will*
> go boom if they encounter this.

You could've just asked.

> Minimally, pkgcore and paludis, current versions see this anywhere,
> they *will* throw an exception because its broken data- to make it
> into the vdb is either corruption of the disk, or corruption of the
> VDB by a broken PM implementation.  Both things have to be flagged,
> even though it sucks, and that's what we do.

No. User is free to use 'invalid' package names whenever he likes
and 'break' the system whenever he likes. PMS should not encourage to
lift this freedom for the sake of compatibility.

Much like POSIX doesn't prohibit systems from accepting any characters
outside the portable character set for filenames. If you use them, you
don't expect 100% portability.

'Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept'

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny