675349 - Config: restrict acceptable section head characters

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Cloud Services :: Server: Core, defect)

Description

[Toby Elliott [:telliott]]

If a section head in a config file contains something other than [A-Za-z0-9_] it's probably an error. Since '.' has a special meaning internally, we should probably start throwing ValueErrors if weird characters are in the section heads.

Comment 1

[Rob Miller [:rmiller]]

(In reply to Toby Elliott [:telliott] from comment #0)
> If a section head in a config file contains something other than
> [A-Za-z0-9_] it's probably an error. Since '.' has a special meaning
> internally, we should probably start throwing ValueErrors if weird
> characters are in the section heads.

This is a little tricky w/ the host-specific configuration stuff we support, b/c we have section headers in production that look similar to this:

[host:sync15.services.mozilla.com]

These are handled correctly by the config parsing and the merging, but they do make it impossible to generate a list of the sections from a Config object, and they make it possible to get meaningless results from `get_section`, e.g. `config.get_section('host:sync15.services')` WOULD return results given the above header, even though such a section doesn't actually exist.

Comment 2

[Toby Elliott [:telliott]]

This bug was more for "let's define a set of characters". Adding colon to the set works fine. Adding random unicode is likely to cause more pain than value.

Good point on period, too.

Comment 3

[Toby Elliott [:telliott]]

Konfig has a whole host of rules associated with this, which probably makes this bug irrelevant at this point.