Re: Enforce canonical paths in client-server protocol?

Greg Hudson wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 12:31, Julian Foad wrote:
>>What I'm saying is all a consequence of my opinion that we should enforce
>>protocols strictly.
>
> As a general rule, I agree.
>
> But in this specific instance, I don't see any value in going to
> additional effort (and perhaps breaking clients) to strictly enforce
> canonical paths.

Ah, but it's not additional effort. There are actually three implementation
options:

+ explicitly reject non-canonical paths;

+ explicitly accept non-canonical paths;

+ don't check; just work if good paths are given and behave indeterminately
(work/fail/crash) if bad paths are given.

The effort to reject or accept non-canonical paths is equal. The only
low-effort approach is to just try to use the paths without checking, but that
already led to crashes in svnserve so it was deemed unacceptable.

Given that the two acceptable approaches require equal effort, the "perhaps
breaking clients" is the determining factor, and we haven't determined how much
of a problem that is. If it's a big problem then I'll agree it won't be worth it.

- Julian

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Received on Sun Jan 16 19:54:32 2005