Quick question about ID_SERIAL

Quick question about ID_SERIAL

[Marcel Holtmann]

Hi Kay,

I have a quick question about ID_SERIAL property. Are these meant to be
D-Bus object path compliant? Meaning they only contain a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _
characters? It would be actually nice to use them directly as an unique
identifier without having to do extra transformations.

Regards

Marcel

Re: Quick question about ID_SERIAL

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 03:35, Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org> wrote:
> I have a quick question about ID_SERIAL property. Are these meant to be
> D-Bus object path compliant? Meaning they only contain a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _
> characters? It would be actually nice to use them directly as an unique
> identifier without having to do extra transformations.

Not really, it is usually just the string where different properties
of a device are concatenated to a single string to create a useful
symlink name. The string for a symlink can also contain valid utf8
sequences and "#+-.:=@_".

Some users of these strings need values which are translatable back to
the original string, so in some cases we escape all non-allowed chars
by "\x..".

We can not really stuff these things into a string that has only the
characters allowed by D-Bus. You could only add a new variable, the
current ones can not really be changed, as they are used in already
established symlink names.

Cheers,
Kay