Illegal Filesystem characters in revision names

[Martin Pool]

On  3 Dec 2005, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> 1) Forbid illegal characters in revision names. People could always
> switch to using Arch-some at archive%foo--baz--1.0--patch-2. But using a
> semicolon to define a namespace is really nice.
> 
> 2) URL encode illegal characters. This means that they would always have
> a legal filesystem name. The question becomes, though, when do you turn
> this on. Do you use it on all platforms, or just on windows? When you
> request it, it actually has to be doubly encoded, since http would
> decode it. If we don't use it everywhere, we still have to be able to
> handle it, since some people will publish using an IIS server, and
> others would use Apache.
> An branch format bump could make this cleaner, and just everyone would
> start using the new format.

I think having it sometimes turned on would just be a mess.  If it's
always on, you might as well just do the escaping at the moment the id
is generated, and then it's the same as option 1.

> 3) Just switch to using a revision.weave file. Since revisions are no
> longer saved directly by their name, we can break ourselves from being
> limited to filesystem constraints. This would also require a branch
> format bump.

Even if we do that, we still have to answer this question for file-ids.
And I think even if we don't expect them to be stored that way, it will
be very useful to have the option of mapping revision ids to files.

My preference would be to keep those characters out.  The only problem
is people who've already done conversions from Arch.

> I'm hesitant to do this until we have knits. We already
> have 1 file (inventory.weave) which scales by the number of commits, I
> wouldn't really want to introduce a second one. (Though it would scale
> better, since the number of lines per revision are much smaller).
> 
> Does anyone have more ideas? I'm leaning towards the third option, since
> we kind of want to do it anyway. And I guess we can just say "arch
> conversions aren't supported on windows until the next branch format".
> Though it might be nice to get it sooner than that, since I've started
> pointing my coworkers to bzr.

My preference would be for #1.

-- 
Martin
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