On Tuesday, 27 November 2007, at 09:27:23 (-0500), Jeff Johnson wrote: > This thread > > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-November/msg02178.html > (which is deranged and silly) reminds me of the parallel case sensitivity > issue > with rpm tag names. > > Originally, rpm tag names were case sensitive, just like any unix input > typically is. > > But SuSE decided (likely because of the German language) that > their version of rpm would capitalize the first letter of all tag names. > > So rpm tag names became case insensitive on input, and a canonical > representation with first letter capitalized, and other letters lower-case, > was chosen everywhere that rpm displays tag names. > > Now its time to define a canonical representation for arbitrary tag names, > whose > numerical value will be derived from whatever string is chosen using a > SHA-1 > digest and some additional bit twiddles. > > So I ask: > > Is "Arbitrary" an adequate canonical representation for an otherwise > case insensitive input string used in a spec file such as > Arbitrary: whatever you want > > or should rpm interpret the following as different tags > arbitrary: > ARBITRARY: > > Note that there are encoding and possibly excluded character (':' > and white space are certainly excluded) issues present in choosing the > canonical string representation of an arbitrary tag name as well. > > What say ye?
Back when I wrote HTML, I used all-caps for tag and attribute names so they were easier to distinguish from attribute values and non-HTML data. I was very angry when XML forced me to lower-case everything because the result was significantly harder to read (as most normal text and user data is lowercase and blended in with the tags). My vote would be "case insensitive" for similar reasons: it lets people capitalize freely, and it prevents the conflict/confusion which will result when somebody like SuSE comes along and decides to change case for some reason or when "Buildhost" does not match "BuildHost" Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Don't you see what Watley is after? Total joke-telling immunity! He's already got the big two religions covered. If he ever gets Polish citizenship, there'll be no stopping him!" -- Jerry Seinfeld ______________________________________________________________________ RPM Package Manager http://rpm5.org Developer Communication List [email protected]
