[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tagline robustness
From: |
Tom Lord |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] tagline robustness |
Date: |
Tue, 19 Aug 2003 11:09:02 -0700 (PDT) |
> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> For instance, all the following taglines refer to _different_ tags:
> /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden>
> */
> /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden>
> */
> /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden> */
> /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden> */
> even though to a casual user, they look basically equivalent.
Ok, I can see that that's an annoyance.
> I suggest that should go much further than it does now in reducing
> taglines to a canonical form: instead of just removing preceding and
> trailing whitespace, _ignore_ any characters not in a restricted subset.
> A good subset might be: address@hidden
> This can be accomplished in a backward-compatible way in two easy steps:
> (1) Change the way arch compares tags to ignore non-subset characters
> in comparisons (and any hash-table indexing or whatever), but keep
> _producing_ tags (e.g. what's written to mod-files-index and
> orig-files-index) using the old rules.
> Change the documentation to say `only these characters are
> significant ...'.
> This way people with old versions of tla/arch/whatever will
> continue to see the same archive contents, and as long as people
> are careful with their taglines (as they've _had_ to be until now,
> so there's not reason for them to change), there's no effect.
> I think it's _extremely_ unlikely that anyone has made taglines
> such that the above change would produce any conflicts.
I agree that it's unlikely. Nevertheless, the change you've
described is not strictly upwards compatible I don't like the idea
for that reason.
-t
[Gnu-arch-users] Re: tagline robustness, Juri Linkov, 2003/08/22