Hi Daniel, On Thu, Jan 05, 2012 at 11:21:58AM +0100, Daniel Dehennin wrote: > Package: devscripts > Version: 2.11.2 > Severity: normal > File: /usr/bin/cowpoke > > Dear Maintainer, > > I'm trying to setup a cowpoke/cowbuilder system but it fails because of > a dot in my distribution name. > > The problem is in cowssh_it, at the top 2 variables are set:
Alternatively, we could say the problem is in your distribution name ... Because if we don't say that, I'm not really sure where the problems will stop to be honest. We could try to sanitise "illegal" characters out of the various fields, but that looks like it could be a rather messy thing to do, and if we start down that slope, which characters should we special case for this? dots, spaces, slashes, braces, unicode combining characters? Alternatively we could completely redesign this in a way that was more tolerant of them, but again, what character set do we intend to tolerate? Without defining that, we're almost sure to fail at it over something. And even if we did come up with some set of "allowed special characters" here, it's not at all clear which other tools will then choke on them anyway. This code was originally written with the constraints of the Debian naming schemes in mind (as surely were most of the other distro tools) - so if you want to extend that, it seems like the first thing you really need to do is to formalise those constraints, so that all the toolmakers and derivatives know what rules we're actually playing by ... So for the moment, I'm open to better suggestions, but I think I'm probably going to close this as a bug against this package, because this isn't really the place where that wider discussion needs to occur, or the place to drive that sort of change from. Sorry, Ron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
