[Gnu-arch-users] Re: tagline robustness

[Miles Bader]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> > I suggest that should go much further than it does now in reducing
> > taglines to a canonical form:  instead of just removing preceding
> > and trailing whitespace, _ignore_ any characters not in a restricted
> > subset.  A good subset might be:  address@hidden
> >
> > I think it's _extremely_ unlikely that anyone has made taglines such
> > that the above change would produce any conflicts.
> 
> I agree that it's unlikely.  Nevertheless, the change you've described
> is not strictly upwards compatible I don't like the idea for that reason.

It seems fundamentally necessary to make a change that incompatible in
_some_ way:

Currently 

    /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden> */

and

    /* arch-tag: my-gnarly-tag <address@hidden>  */

are different tags, and if you make them the _same_ tag, there exists
the (very remote) possibility that somebody will get screwed.

The best you can do is to make the probability very, very, low, and I
think what I proposed does that.  For practical purposes it's zero.

I think it's much more likely that people will get screwed by the
problem I'm complaining about, than by this change.

Can you think of a better solution to this problem?  [but don't think
too long -- I think it's also important to do something soon, as the
number of users appears to be growing quickly.]

Thanks,

-Miles
-- 
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it
has to be us.  -- Jerry Garcia