Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
Which characters one can safely use in filenames on at least the platforms OpenLDAP is ported to: Unix, Windows (cygwin), IBM zOS and MacOS X according to ANNOUNCEMENT? In particular Windows, since that's the most common non-Unix platform.
MacOSX supports both BSD UFS and Mac HFS(+). In UFS a forward slash is reserved as a path separator, while in HFS the colon serves that purpose. MacOSX swaps the two whenever they appear in the wrong filesystem.
E.g., a file named "foo:bar" stored on UFS will be named "foo/bar" if it's copied to HFS. Currently the MacOSX FileManager will always display paths with "/" as the separator, so it's simplest to treat MacOSX the same as Unix/POSIX.
http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2006/qa1392.html (Note that we only use BSD APIs...)
HFS also shares the Windows characteristic of being case-preserving but otherwise case-insensitive. I think we can ignore this and just tell people to use UFS if they want to use back-ldif.
IBM z/OS is supported using their UNIX System Services environment. In that environment, regular Unix file conventions apply.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zoslnctr/v1r7/index.jsp?topic=/com....
Building OpenLDAP as a Cygwin app is not recommended and I see no reason to make any special effort to support it.
For native Windows, the forbidden characters are listed here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx
< > : " / \ | ? *
Windows has a lot of problems, period. I don't think it's worth spending much effort on this platform.
E.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_dewey/archive/2004/01/19/60263.aspx you can create legal file names/paths that the Windows desktop cannot manipulate... We're only using Win32 APIs (and AFAIK the POSIX subsystem was deprecated anyway) so it shouldn't be an issue for us.
I only know Unix filenames. Googling around I've found a plethora of conflicting info.
It's for a naming scheme for back-ldif filenames that will let back-ldif work as a general backend, and hopefully won't conflict with its current names for the config database. ITS#5408.
Currently back-ldif takes the RDN and escapes the directory separator as "\hex", which doesn't work on Windows where \ is a directory separator.
Some other notes:
- Don't need really general filenames. OpenLDAP does in any case assume Unix/Windows/URL-style pathnames: root to the left, leaf to the right, a single directory separator character.
Every supported platform works that way.
Hopefully the characters "=-{}" can be used, since database config uses those characters. E.g. olcDatabase={-1}frontend,cn=config. ",+" would be nice too, as separators in and between RDNs.
Need some escape character. Howard suggested % as in URL-escaping. First that sounded nice, but on second thought such a filename is not a valid file:// URL component for that file - the '%' must be URL-escaped again to access the file as an URL. Not sure if that's a good argument either way.
OK. It was just an idea, we can use something else instead.
Full URL-escaping also escapes {} which is unfortunate (see point 1).
- For real paranoia, might escape uppercase characters in case-sensitive attribute types too. I won't bother unless someone disagrees, both case-sensitive DNs and the use of back-ldif as a general database are fairly rare.
Ignore that. back-ldif should never be used as a general database.