[katello-devel] Case sensitive behavior in katello

[Cliff Perry]

On 08/09/2012 05:25 PM, Eric Sammons wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On 9.8.2012 18:08, Eric Sammons wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> On 9.8.2012 17:48, Eric Sammons wrote:
>>>>> During a call today some questions about case sensitive behavior
>>>>> for users, environments, and I'm sure applicable to other areas,
>>>>> came up.  The short, should Name == name == NaMe == NAME?
>>>>>
>>>>> The issue here is, especially with usernames, orgs, and
>>>>> environments, username should equal USERNAME likewise a dev
>>>>> environment should be the same as a DEV environment (within a org
>>>>> Dev is not going to be different from DEV and JOHNDOE won't be a
>>>>> different user from JohnDoe).  Does everyone agree? Keep in mind
>>>>> this would likely apply to organizational names as well.
>>>>
>>>> Do we support UTF-8 characters in some of those NAMEs?
>>>>
>>>> Mirek
>>>>
>>>
>>> I should have mentioned that the issue today is that katello treats
>>> these values as unique; i.e. under ACME_Corporation I can have
>>> Library->DEV->dev.  I am under the impression that this should not
>>> be permitted.
>>>
>>> --Eric
>>
>> While I was trying to point that ruby does not handle UTF well:
>>
>> a='exámple'
>> a.upcase
>> =>  "EXáMPLE"
>>
>> And I personally do not see Library->DEV->dev as problem. I can even
>> imagine, that somebody may want this.
>>
>> Mirek
>>
>
> Coming from GSS and having been a customer I can assure you that DEV == dev == Dev in a production world.  Anything like Library->DEV->dev would be bad design within a company because in the real world dev is dev is dev regardless of how you type it.  The same goes for usernames; in fact most web ui apps will convert for you the username entered to the case supported (for example I have seen, esammons at example.com get changed to ESAMMONS at EXAMPLE.COM, perhaps they have a Mainframe backend).
>
> So while I may not agree here that allowing Dev DEV and dev, I am more of the opinion that we either fix it or we document it because as is the current behavior could be dangerous.
>
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IMHO - usernames should not be case sensitive, but I could also see 
where an MS Active Directory environment in play it may be important to 
not lowercase everything for a user authentication to successfully occur.

In general, I feel that we shouldn't allow Dev, DEV, dev to be 
different... but, with how we have things today, what is the negative 
user experience/feedback to say we should change?
  - I'd prefer to not change things, just to change it into what we 
think is more correct.
   - Upgrades would be a blast to try and force upgrade folks from Dev, 
DEV, dev to dev, dev1, dev2.

Cliff