[gentoo-dev] Illegal news item name

Vlastimil Babka · External Since: Sep 21, 2006 Posts: 41

Hi,

it was brought up by ulm that the news item
'2009-04-18-java-config-wrapper-0.16' has an illegal name because it
contains a dot. As it was me who named and commited it, I am sorry for
this mistake. The file name in -dev review mail was called
'generation1-deprecation' and I probably should have just added the date
to it and not try to stick to the package name + version. My bad.

The question is what to do now, rename it? Users will then see it again,
and I don't know if there are even worse consequences.
Betelgeuse suggested also commit hook that would check filenames.

Cheers,
Vlastimil

Zac Medico · External Since: Mar 06, 2006 Posts: 71

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> The question is what to do now, rename it? Users will then see it again,
> and I don't know if there are even worse consequences.

AFAIK, seeing it again is the worst that will happen. The cvs ->
rsync script will ensure that the incorrectly named new item is
deleted on the rsync side after it's removed from cvs.
- --
Thanks,
Zac
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAko9L60ACgkQ/ejvha5XGaMJ7QCfe/p1UHoBTrhXl4l3GXtS5YL2
zv8AoK8KiNS1feDMy6uiqKr8xReCCkP0
=1FWI
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Dale · External Since: Jun 20, 2009 Posts: 43

Zac Medico wrote:
> Vlastimil Babka wrote:
> > The question is what to do now, rename it? Users will then see it again,
> > and I don't know if there are even worse consequences.
>
> AFAIK, seeing it again is the worst that will happen. The cvs ->
> rsync script will ensure that the incorrectly named new item is
> deleted on the rsync side after it's removed from cvs.

As a lowly user, I would rather see it twice than to not see it at all.
Although the argument could be made that java is not a critical package.

Dale

Smile

Ulrich Mueller · External Since: May 13, 2007 Posts: 27

>>>>> On Sat, 20 Jun 2009, Vlastimil Babka wrote:

> it was brought up by ulm that the news item
> '2009-04-18-java-config-wrapper-0.16' has an illegal name because it
> contains a dot.

I stumbled upon this when I experimented with news to e-mail
forwarding, where there are some limitations for the characters
allowed in headers. Of course everything can be filtered, but things
would be easier if we could stick to the GLEP 42 specification
(namely "a"-"z", "0"-"9", "+", "-", and "_").

> The question is what to do now, rename it? Users will then see it
> again, and I don't know if there are even worse consequences.

> Betelgeuse suggested also commit hook that would check filenames.

Infra, would this be possible? Only files with names
yyyy-mm-dd-shortname.lang.txt and yyyy-mm-dd-shortname.lang.txt.asc
(for detached signature) should be allowed, and character set as
mentioned above.

Ulrich

Ulrich Mueller · External Since: May 13, 2007 Posts: 27

>>>>> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Vlastimil Babka wrote:

> unfortunately this is what happens in current eselect-news.
[bunch of bash error messages deleted]

Good catch. The news-tng module of eselect-1.1* handles it more
gracefully (no bash errors), but it still displays an error message.

> This is because the old entry stays in
> /var/lib/gentoo/news/news-gentoo.read

Seems that we have no real procedure for removal of news items.
Unfortunately GLEP 42 only says that they can be removed, but doesn't
specify what should happen with the entry in the news-*.unread or
news-*.read file.

Since the package manager adds these lines, I guess that it would be
its task to delete them from news-*.{unread,read} if the news item
itself was removed. Or should the eselect module handle it?

> So what to do? Fix eselect first and then do the rename? Rename now,
> recommend purge, and fix eselect later?

Seems that just keeping the item with the bad name will cause least
breakage for users. Sigh.

> Update GLEP 42 to allow dots in news item filenames?

Please don't.

> Any technical reason they are not allowed, except for hypothetical
> compatibility (nothing broken was reported due to this item yet).

The news-tng module has an option to export news items in mbox format,
and needs to generate message-ids for this. It's natural to generate
their local part from the news item's name, and then it's good to be
conservative on the allowed character set.

Ulrich