[katello-devel] Case sensitive behavior in katello

[Eric Sammons]

----- Original Message -----
> On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 12:25:41PM -0400, Eric Sammons wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> In particular, why having both DEV and dev is a bad thing?
> Personally, I
> like the possibility of having them, while I understand it can be
> pretty
> cluttered.

This would be a horrible behavior as in a corporate IT shop you would not want to have a discussion that goes something like:

IT Tech1: Today I will be promoting to dev
IT Tech2: Will that be capital dev or lowercase dev?
IT Tech1: hmmmm, good question.

> 
> In any case, we can expect UTF-8 issues (Ruby 1.8 vs Ruby 1.9),
> because
> there are many non-US characters that has uppercase and lowercase
> variants. External dependency will likely need to be introduced for
> Ruby
> 1.8. Does it really worth the change?

What I believe would be correct is some logic that simply checks to see if, dev in this example exists in the db. I'm not sure if this would work but perhaps a check that simple does 

if env_input.lower() != env_from_db.lower():
  store(input)

Regardless, it sounds like this issue is much easier to address in Ruby 1.9 so based on the feedback on this thread I am going to mark the bugs out there already as Future Feature and perhaps we can get a user story for SAM-1.3 and CFSE-1.?

Thanks for everyone's input.

--Eric