[rb-general] SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP format specification proposals

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Thu 2017-01-12 22:45:02 -0500, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> I expect an encoding that's restricted to [0x21, 0x7E] make the
> standard easier for people to adopt: envvars are traditionally
> restricted to this subset, notwithstanding that getenv(3) return type
> allos any NUL-terminated string.
>
> My point was that SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP will have more producers than it
> will have consumers.

the deployment challenge here is that we need the consumers to be
willing to adopt it first; without any consumers, there will be no
producers.

That said, i find myself swayed by Daniel's arguments for
round-trippable data.

Daniel's 1a ("key1:value1:key2:value2" on non-windows,
"key1;value1;key2;value2" on windows) seems the simplest to me.  People
already know how to parse $PATH, and this is just that with an even
number of values.

If people complain about colons, it's the same problem they're already
used to dealing with with $PATH, right?

     --dkg
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