Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Is tagline an attractive nuisance for international users?

[John Meinel]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> The tagline tag-snarfing algorithm is
>
> 1. Restrict the file to 1st 1K plus last 1K.
> 2. Find "^[[:blank:][:punct:]]*arch-tag:[[:blank:]]*(.*?)[^[:graph:]]*$"
>    where *? is the shy repetition operator (subject to the 1024 byte
>    boundary)
> 3. Grab the group, and smash any octet in it outside of [33,126] to '_'.
> 4. Return the result of 3.
>
> Anybody using a "human-readable" algorithm for tag construction in a
> language other than English is liable for lots of collisions.  For
> example, in EUC or UTF-8 Japanese, the tag disappears (it gets scarfed
> by the non-captured trailing [[:graph:]]* in the regexp) unless
> there's some stray non-blank non-Japanese in the tag part.
>
> I think nowadays everybody is using uuidgen or the like, but this
> probably should be documented.

As it is being brought up. I would like to see the [[:blank:]][:punct:]]
relaxed a little bit if possible.

The specific problem is that batch files use "rem" as the comment
marker. At least with my testing, I wasn't able to add a tagline. Now I
don't use a lot of .bat files, but I've been working with a system that
does. I can always explicit tag, but as always, I prefer taglines.

Further than that, I agree, human readable taglines will certianly cause
all sorts of problems in non-ASCII text. Would it be possible to also
restrict the tagline to being longer than some minimum, which would help
detect bad taglines from the beginning, before a commit, and possible
collisions?

Just some thoughts,
John
=:->

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