[packagekit] handling input

[Matthias Clasen]

On Jan 1, 2008 2:57 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, it's an artificial restriction. If you removed the check and used
> a package_id with a space then everything would still work. The point is
> _why_ - can and should a package name ever contain a space?

I have no issue with this restriction on package names; I stumbled over it
when I tried to set up a repository named "PK test" ...
>
> > - update descriptions are artificially forced to be a single line by
> > means of s/\n/;/. This looks, smells and feels like a bug introduced
> > by the choice to funnel the frontend-backend communication through
> > single lines on stdout...
>
> Yes, we have to do this to keep everything abstract for the non-compiled
> backends. We have to work with backends written in python, perl, sh or
> whatever. stdout is the lowest common denominator and also allows us to
> test stuff trivially.

Sure, of course, if you bend down to the lowest common denominator, you get
to do all the higher-level fun yourself, like string escaping,
encoding issues, etc
etc

> Why is s/\n/;/ a problem? Are there any other issues with this?

it is a problem because

<description>
  Test update; see if this works.
  Line two.
</description>

Comes out as "  ;  Test update; see if this works.;  Line two.  ;"
which will leave the poor user wondering about the package maintainers
writing skills...

If you are really willing to swallow the "everything must be forced
through a single line of ASCII" mantra, at least choose a
transformation that can be undone in the frontend. The ';' is not a
save choice for that, as the example shows.