[Monotone-devel] Re: locale bug ?

[Lapo Luchini]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> 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. :-/

One (valid, but it's not the only way) reason could have been that we 
concatenate 3 fields with colons and sign their hash: the field must be 
taken care to be "parsable", not because we actually need to parse them 
(we couldn't invert the hash anyway) but because if they are parseable 
then their representation is unique and attacks on the signed data are 
avoided.

    Lapo