[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH] 0015 Only split CSV strings once

[Martin Kosek]

On Fri, 2012-02-24 at 11:09 +0100, Petr Viktorin wrote:
...
> You need four backslashes for a literal backslash, three to escape a 
> comma. I think 2.1 clients are already broken, and the backwards 
> incompatibility would only affect workarounds.
> 

Yes, but CSV values without escaping works. And this IMO covers 99% of
user cases, especially given the fact that escaping is that difficult to
use. Users can simply not use characters that need escaping.

We cannot break commands like this one:
ipa dnsrecord-add example.com foo --a-rec=10.0.0.1,10.0.0.2
ipa user-mod --phone=555-1234,555-6789

I would be OK with changing CSV formatting if it supports both ways:
1) Plain arrays from new clients where CSV parsing is done just once
(only on clients)
2) CSV value which is then parsed on the server

Martin