On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 18:04:59 +0200
Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >>>>> On Sat, 29 Sep 2012, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> >>     d) Require a) for Package managers and b) by tree policy
> >>        (Postel's Law, brought up by mgorny). Practically, this
> >>        would mean that repoman would reject "foo-1" as package
> >>        name, but the rest of Portage would accept it.
> 
> > Postel's Law is what lead to the current state of HTML and
> > JavaScript, where everything has to be tested carefully on dozens of
> > different browser versions and littered with workarounds. Accepting
> > lax input just leads to lax input being provided...
> 
> Providing lax input is not at all Postel's Law, but the opposite of
> it.

But as you can see from HTML, and all the stuff Portage accepts
currently, and from countless other examples, the only way to prevent
bad input from being provided is to reject it. Following one half of
Postel's law just leads to the other half being violated.

> In our case, strict input would be enforced with repoman.

Repoman can't parse bash code.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh