[Yum-devel] [PATCH] quote uids to keep cachedir ascii-clean. BZ 832195

[Seth Vidal]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012, Zdenek Pavlas wrote:

>>  It solves the problem, but the commit messages says "uids" when it's
>> actually "username" ... and I _think_ sysadmins. would much prefer it
>> if we didn't quote here.
>
> Sorry, i meant 'uid' as in rfc4519 (login name), not the numeric one,
> neither the (full) user name.
>
>>  Atm. we have stuff like:
>>
>> yum-james-dwPkso/
>>
>> ...and after this patch we'll have stuff like:
>>
>> yum-j%C2%B9-dwPkso/
>
> 'james' is ascii, so there should be no change (unless I miss something)
> I'm using this patch for a while, and it's still 'yum-zpavlas-Ol3yeF'..
>
>> yum-[123]-dwPkso/
>> ...where "123" is their uid. Another option is to use the uid all the
>> time. Any opinions?
>
> Two code paths are bad.  The nice thing with quoting is that it's no-op
> in most cases, so we don't pollute /var/tmp with two sets of directories.


So positives and negatives:

if you ask a user to give you their cachedir so you can figure out why 
something broke - they are going to have a hard time finding it if they 
have any odd chars in their username.

In that sense james' mechanism is easier for visual inspection.

having said that - unless the system is multi-user - then the only dir in 
/var/tmp is going to be the users so... not likely to be a lot of 
confusion.

sysadmins will just let tmpwatch do its job and reap that directory 
normally.

so - kinda a tossup in terms of functionality to the user.

-sv