Re: [Monotone-devel] locale bug ?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Timothy Brownawell <address@hidden> wrote:
>  > mtn: misuse: error converting 12 UTF-8 bytes to IDNA ACE: non-LDH 
> characters
>  >
>  > Any ideas how I can solve the problem and avoid it in the future?  Is
>  > this a bug or am I doing something wrong ?  Is this related to the
>  > fact that the cert value is a multi line string ?
>
>  Monotone has some very silly rules about what characters can be in a
>  cert name -- numbers, letters, and '-'. I have no idea what the
>  reasoning behind this rule was, but we should probably try to make it go
>  away. Until that happens, you'll have to use cert names that only have
>  those characters.

It's a consequence of certain fields in the database being run through
a canonicalization designed for domain names (that's what IDNA is).
The only person who might possibly have remembered the rationale is
Graydon, but I already asked him and he doesn't. :-/

I'm definitely in favor of getting rid of it.  It has to be done a
little carefully because one of the things that gets canonicalized
this way is key IDs, but I think it can be done without forcing us to
reissue certs, even in the unlikely event that someone has a key ID
that was changed by the canonicalization.

There are two higher-level concerns, which are, what do we then do
with cert names / key IDs that are the same under some Unicode
canonicalization?  And do we need to worry about e.g. CYRILLIC CAPITAL
LETTER A being visually indistinguishable from LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A,
despite their not being unified by any Unicode canonicalization?
(This was a major issue with opening up DNS to non-ASCII names.)

zw