Re: [Chicken-hackers] [patch] disallow slashes in egg names, ignore . and ..

[Peter Bex]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 04:46:22PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> However, there should be a restriction on egg names when they are
> installed into henrietta, to make sure that they are portable to all
> operating systems.  The safe list is a-z, 0-9, !, #, $, %, &, ', (, ),
> comma, -, ., ;, =, @, ^, _, `, {, }, and ~.  A-Z are safe if we make
> sure that no two egg names differ only in case.  Personally I'd go with
> a-z, A-Z (only used by 9ML-toolkit, F-operator, and miniML), 0-9, and
> hyphen only.
> 
> There is also a blacklist of names that don't work on Windows and
> should be rejected case-insensitively: con, prn, aux, clock$, nul,
> com[0-9], lpt[0-9], ms$mouse, emmxxxx0, xmsxxxx0, smartaar, and setverxx.
> This includes the globs (not regular expressions) con.* and *.con, etc.

Let's not build complete omniscience of all crufty things of all OSes
Chicken runs on into chicken-install; that's completely over-engineering
the matter.  If there's an issue with an egg name under some OS, people
using that OS trying to install that egg can contact the egg author and
ask for a rename.

For example, if I release an egg which provides Scheme wrappers for
Unix-only functions (fork, kqueue, whatever), I wouldn't want to be
bothered with all the restrictions of that silly other thing that
calls itself an OS - my egg wouldn't even run on it in the first place!

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
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