[Cvs-dev] Re: valid tag identifiers

[Jim Hyslop]

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Mark D. Baushke wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Okay, I have a hack on top of Jim's latest patch which tightens up
> error checking on valid tag identifiers which he credits to a report
> by Alan Harder <address@hidden> that I apparently missed seeing.

The discussion on this was almost a year ago. The original discussion
can be found here
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cvs/2005-07/msg00044.html and
here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-cvs/2005-08/msg00005.html

I had written the patch, but was having troubles getting it to run under
Cygwin. I put it aside, and forgot about it until recently.

> Given that I know of multiple sites that converted from RCS to CVS, it
> is not reasonable to tell them that all of their old tag names are no
> longer available to them. So, I suggest that a checkout or update using
> the old tags should still work. I am not as certain what to do if a
> branch tag is being used and someone tries to add a new file to the
> branch... I suspect that this current set of patches will disallow
> adding the new files to the 'illegal' tag in that case. However, I have
> not yet written any tests for that situation.

[...]

> To be honest, I am still not sure I consider the restrictions to CVS
> tags as something other than RCS tags to be wise. How many times are
> folks using 8-bit characters out of the ISO 8859-1 or ISO 8859-5
> character set rather than the "C" locale in tag names?
I took the approach of making the code conform to the documentation,
which says that only letters, numbers, underscores and dashes are allowed.

Perhaps the better approach would be to revert the changes, and update
the documentation. Does anyone know why CVS tightened the restrictions
on what's allowed? I can't see offhand any particular reason for not
allowing basically any character, except whitespace.

> All of the characters with umlaut's and the like become illegal with
> Jim's original change and I suspect this may be highly undesirable.

I think that may qualify for understatement of the year :=)

- --
Jim Hyslop
Dreampossible: Better software. Simply.     http://www.dreampossible.ca
                 Consulting * Mentoring * Training in
    C/C++ * OOD * SW Development & Practices * Version Management
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