Re: [PATCH] Add platform information to user agent string

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 10:42 PM, C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net> wrote:
> On 10/30/2012 02:15 PM, Julian Foad wrote:
>> Ivan Zhakov wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 8:07 PM, Ben Reser wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Ivan Zhakov wrote:
>>>>> I think it will be useful to add client platform information to
>>>>> user agent string, to use it Apache HTTP Server configuration or
>>>>> Subversion hooks. Within my patch applied user agent will be like
>>>>> this: SVN/1.8.0 (Windows) serf/1.1.1 TortoiseSVN/1.8.0 SVN/1.8.0
>>>>> (Macintosh) serf/1.1.1 SVN/1.8.0 (FreeBSD) serf/1.1.1
>>>>
>>>> Useful how?
>>> For example to disable plain-text basic authentication on Windows. Or
>>> disable commits from Linux using pre-commit hook.
>>
>> (1) Brane has recently added platform identification to the 'svn
>> --version' command; is there any reason to use different code here
>> producing a different set of platform identifiers? It would seem much
>> better to share that code -- whether using just the 'platform' string or
>> the whole 'platform-cpu-vendor' (or whatever it is) tuple -- so that the
>> two sets of client identifiers cannot get out of sync.
>
> Agreed that there should be a single canonical source of "build
> information", and that the work Brane has done seems the reasonable best
> candidate of such.
>
I completely agree that it would be great to have one code to get
platform information. But current svn_sysinfo* implementation provides
detailed information which very expensive to obtain. In some codepath
we have to execute external commands. This is fine for separate
command, but I think that's does makes sense for every Subversion
library call. That's why I suggest use static build time information
in user-agent string.

>> (2) C-Mike Pilato (?) has recently added some sort of ability for
>> pre-commit hooks to see more information (via txn-rev-props), which AFAIK
>> was partly intended to let the hook see more info about the client
>> platform. I don't know exactly what it does, but isn't that a more
>> suitable place to put any new extensions of this kind of functionality?
>
> By modifying the user-agent string in this fashion, Ivan is effectively
> making use of my enhancements. And because of how he chose to do so, the
> additional platform information will also show up in Apache log (like a
> browser's User-Agent string does), too.
>
Exactly. That was my idea.

-- 
Ivan Zhakov