Re: [Monotone-devel] Bug in monotone automate inventory

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:57:07PM +0200, Jon Bright wrote:
> An interesting question - should monotone allow you to create any old 
> filename, or should it restrict you to names with half a chance of being 
> cross-platform compatible?  I'd argue for at least the default to be the 
> latter, on the grounds that

It isn't that, so much; we perfectly happily let you stick things like
colons in filenames (illegal on win32), and have names that are the
same except for case (blows up trying to check out on any case
insensitive filesystem, like win32 always and osx often).  We could
handle this more gracefully, but we decided that trying to force
everyone to the least common denominator was a non-starter; too many
projects don't care about cross-platform compatibility, and we can't
really impose that policy on them.

The checks that are in there are for actual non-printable control
characters, which tend to do things like cause your terminal to go
insane.  (Allowing arbitrary VT100 command sequences would be a
serious security bug, considering that they can push bytes into the
keyboard input buffer -- running ls might push "rm -rf ~\n" in, and
then when the ls completes your shell will have that waiting on
stdin!)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
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