Re: [Monotone-devel] automate stdio extensions

[Timothy Brownawell]

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 01:05 -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Right now, 'automate stdio's parser silently ignores anything between
> the "e" that ends one command, and the "l" that starts the next.  I
> guess the idea was to make it easier to add extensions in the future?

I think so. But having it throw an error instead of ignoring things it
doesn't understand would work just as well for that.

(I think this may have been related to how in some other applications
ignoring attempts to use unimplemented functionality really is a good
idea for compatibility. But that kind of thing is *totally wrong* in
this context.)

> And we are talking about using this space for extensions (in
> particular, for key/value style arguments as well as positional style
> arguments).  But, this seems broken... if a process starts feeding us
> key/value arguments (for example), and we are an old monotone that
> does not understand them, then we will silently do something different
> than expected. 

Yes. Oops.

>  Worse, it's entirely possible that those arguments
> will include the character "l", at which point we will lose sync
> entirely...
> 
> So am I missing something, or should we make sure that gibberish
> between "e" and "l" causes an error before we release the next
> version?

Yeah, we should.

-- 
Timothy

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