Re: [Issue 1807] ra_dav doesn't permit properties to have colons in their names.

On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 10:16:29PM -0300, Nicolás_Lichtmaier wrote:
> You are not supposed to assign any meaning to namespace prefixes. i.e.
> if you exchange prefixes but keep the sane namespace URI the resulting
> XML should be the same.

I did say it was a hack. We can certainly generate an xmlns tag for
each namespace and then make the : be part of the URL. In fact. Now
that I think about it. That should allow multiple colons.

We take and assign a namespace of:
Prandomnum (but unique within the result) to:
http://subversion.tigris.org/xmlns/customproperty/svk:

Then the propname could be:
Prandomnum:signature

Then when we can simply strip
http://subversion.tigris.org/xmlns/customproperty/

If we split on the last colon in the property name this works.

My initial suggestion was mostly based upon an earlier understanding of
the code and how it works.

But I'm not sure if this same technique could work for sending. I'd
need to do some further digging.

It's still somewhat of a hack but it works without eliminating any names
that we currently allow.

> Why not choosing an XML allowed Unicode character, forbid it, and use it
> to encode colons? Or as part of an escape equence...

Because there's not very many characters to work with. XML is pretty
restrictive with regard to what chacters are allowed. IMHO this simply
shifts us from having one bug to another. Some users will come along
wanting to use that character. How do we decide what languages
special chars we should exclude?

Further, wouldn't starting to exclude some names that we allow today be
illegal under our compatability gurantees until 2.0.0? I might be
willing to fudge the multiple colons thing here. But now that I've come
up with a solution that solves that too, I'm not sure we should accept
any solution that diminishes the possible namspace of properties.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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