Issue 157 in svnbook: ch03: request to clarify and improve Subversion property name specification

[svnbook at googlecode.com]

Status: New
Owner: ----
Labels: Type-Enhancement Priority-Medium Milestone-whenever

New issue 157 by cmpil... at gmail.com: ch03: request to clarify and improve  
Subversion property name specification
http://code.google.com/p/svnbook/issues/detail?id=157

User Garret Wilson <garret at globalmentor.com> ran into some trouble caused,  
at least to a degree, by insufficient documentation of the hard  
requirements around Subversion property names.
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2012-01/0274.shtml

In the past, the book has stated at different times:

"Generally speaking, the names and values of the properties can be whatever  
you want them to be, with the constraint that the names must be  
human-readable text."[1]

and

"Generally speaking, the names and values of the properties can be whatever  
you want them to be, with the constraint that the names must contain only  
ASCII characters."[2]

But neither of those is strictly accurate.  Let's try to provide a precise  
description of what is and isn't valid in property naming.  Let's also  
explain that while not all of Subversion's APIs and layers will prevent the  
use of names that don't meet the criteria, that doesn't make such usage  
acceptable, and newer versions of Subversion could crack down on this loose  
validation at any time to the ultimate frustration of the administrator who  
has used invalid property names.

[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s02.html
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.props.html