Re: configuration input validation (was Re: New plugin: auth_ldap_bind)

[John Peacock]

Elliot F wrote:
($ldhost = $self->qp->config('ldap_host')) =~ qr/^(([a-z0-9]+\.?)+)$/;
$ldhost = "localhost" unless ($ldhost);
Work similarly, without requiring a special sub?
Actually, that is nice and compact.  My suggestion for adding it to 
config() was to encourage module authors to think seriously about what 
they are doing.  I was hoping to prevent slack tests like this:

plugins/rcpt_ok-  for my $allowed (@rcpt_hosts) {
plugins/rcpt_ok:    $allowed =~ s/^\s*(\S+)/$1/;
Yes, I wrote that module, why do you ask? :0
Making it easy to use and documenting it makes it more likely that it 
would be used effectively.

I like your idea of predefined regexp to match the bulk of the likely 
input values, but I wonder if just using Regexp::Common might be easier 
than brewing our own (see the example in Chapter 5 of /Mastering Regular 
Expressions/ for performing a IP address test).  Looking at the current 
collection of plugins, the following would need to be covered:

        FQDN
        IP
        FILENAME or PATH
        INTEGER or NUMBER
        STRING of CHARACTER
The remaining capture replacements seem to be mostly stripping certain 
bits out of output captured from an external program and don't have any 
bearing on this discussion...

John