Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: netsync connection info cleanup

[Derek Scherger]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 5:54 PM, Zack Weinberg <address@hidden> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Timothy Brownawell <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Is the occasional backslash really that bad? '%' conflicts with urlencoding
> (and '*' would only actually glob things if you have some really weirdly
> named files), and '?' is probably necessary for file/ssh sync.

I think it's more important to avoid characters that are meaningful in
URLs (*especially* %) than to avoid characters that are meaningful to
the shell.  People expect to have to quote URLs.  Also, I don't like /
as a separator when it's not traversing a directory-like hierarchy.

Agreed, on all counts.

 

So, how about this?

 protocol://address@hidden/path/to/database?include,include,-exclude,-exclude

should work equally well for mtn (with usher), ssh, and file.  Without
usher, you just leave out the /path part.

+1 (nice and simple)

 

(Also, ~ in the path part should absolutely have the 'go to home
directory' semantic.)

Agreed here too.

This proposal doesn't change the meaning of any URL-special characters which I think is important. Overloading % + ? = or & would be bad as people generally know what they mean in the context of a URL. We could consider using the fragment character # in place of the query string separator character ? but that's probably splitting hairs. This is a shell-special character too (for comments) but it doesn't seem to apply if there's non-whitespace immediately preceding it.

Cheers,

Derek