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Fixed-length keywords can cause unexpected file corruption.

From: C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
Date: 2006-03-15 16:49:12 CET

This might be public knowledge already, but it occurred to me while
documenting the fixed-length keyword syntax in svnbook last night. To make
it easy on myself, I'll just paste what I added to the book:

   Be aware that because the width of a keyword field is measure in bytes,
   the potential for corruption of multi-byte values exists. For example, a
   username which contains some multi-byte UTF-8 characters might suffer
   truncation in the middle of the string of bytes which make up one of
   those characters. The result will be a mere truncation when viewed at the
   byte level, but will likely appear as a string with an incorrect or
   garbled final character when viewed as UTF-8 text. It is conceivable that
   certain applications, when asked to load the file, would notice the
   broken UTF-8 text and deem the entire file corrupt, refusing to operate
   on the file altogether.

If this was discussed early, sorry for the noise. I *don't* think it is
a bug. But I did feel it was something to call out in the text.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato@collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand

Received on Wed Mar 15 16:55:40 2006

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