[linuxtools-dev] connection names embedded in URI's

[Corey Ashford <cjashfor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

I ran across an interesting problem with using the URI's that are formed
in the linuxtools plug-in.  I wonder if you have any thoughts on this...

We end up with URI's that look something like:

remotetools://<connection-name>/<path-to-something>

The problem that I ran into is that if I instantiate a URI object based
on one of these strings, I get a URISyntaxException thrown if the
<connection-name> contains any embedded blanks, or characters other than
a-zA-Z0-9, hyphen, and dots.  The syntax is defined by RFC-952 and
RFC-1123.  RFC-952 states:

   A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
   to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
   sign (-), and period (.).  Note that periods are only allowed when
   they serve to delimit components of "domain style names".

RFC-1123 relaxed the above rules, allowing up to 255 characters, and
allowing the first character to be a digit (so as to allow for IP
addresses).


It seems to me that there are a two solutions to this problem:

1) Create our own URI-like class that is more forgiving of the
characters in the "host" field.

2) Request that the upstream Remote Tools and RSE folks restrict the
connection names according to the above limitation (e.g. no embedded
blanks, etc.).  My hunch is that this would be a no go.

Any others?

Have you run into this issue before?  What do you think?

Thanks for your consideration,

- Corey