From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Kay Sievers Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:24:41 +0000 Subject: Re: Quick question about ID_SERIAL Message-Id: List-Id: References: <1262831747.16627.419.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1262831747.16627.419.camel@localhost.localdomain> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 03:35, Marcel Holtmann 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