Open Stack

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 01:52:35PM -0400, Chris St. Pierre wrote:
> We have proposed that the allowed characters for all resource names in Nova
> (flavors, aggregates, etc.) be expanded to all printable unicode characters
> and horizontal spaces: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/119741
> 
> Currently, the only allowed characters in most resource names are
> alphanumeric, space, and [.-_].
> 
> We have proposed this change for two principal reasons:
> 
> 1. We have customers who have migrated data forward since Essex, when no
> restrictions were in place, and thus have characters in resource names that
> are disallowed in the current version of OpenStack. This is only likely to
> be useful to people migrating from Essex or earlier, since the current
> restrictions were added in Folsom.
> 
> 2. It's pretty much always a bad idea to add unnecessary restrictions
> without a good reason. While we don't have an immediate need to use, for
> example, the ever-useful http://codepoints.net/U+1F4A9 in a flavor name,
> it's hard to come up with a reason people *shouldn't* be allowed to use it.
> 
> That said, apparently people have had a need to not be allowed to use some
> characters, but it's not clear why:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/977187
> 
> So I guess if anyone knows any reason why these printable characters should
> not be joined in holy resource naming, speak now or forever hold your peace.

I would consider any place where there is a user specified, free form
string intended for end user consumption should be totally unrestricted
in the characters it allows. To arbitrarily restrict the user is a bug.
If there are current technical reasons for the restriction we should look
at what we must do to resolve them.

Regards,
Daniel
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