Re: Unable to create a chain called "trace"

[Phil Sutter <phil@nwl.cc>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 01:29:23PM +0100, Florian Westphal wrote:
> Phil Sutter <phil@nwl.cc> wrote:
> > > grammar bug.
> > > 
> > > Pablo, Phil, others, can you remind me why we never did:
> > 
> > Because this would be followed up by:
> > 
> > | Subject: Unable to create a table called "trace"
> > 
> > Jokes aside:
> > 
> > I think Pablo didn't like the obvious consequence of having to quote
> > *all* string types which are user-defined in output. He played with
> > keeping the quotes as part of the name, so they are sent to kernel and
> > in listing they would automatically appear quoted. I don't quite
> > remember why this was problematic, though.
> >
> > In general, shells eating the quotes is problematic and users may not be
> > aware of it. This includes scripts that mangle ruleset dumps by
> > accident, etc. (Not sure if it is really a problem as we quote some
> > strings already).
> 
> Ok, but what if we just allow use of quotes in input?
> That would at least allow to use nft to delete/add to chains created
> by other tools.

IIRC, this was deemed to make things worse as people may more easily
create rulesets which break with 'nft list ruleset | nft -f -'. But that
point won't hold anymore now, I guess. :D

Extracting the changes to parser_bison.y from my patch in
| Message-Id: <20190116184613.31698-1-phil@nwl.cc>
might suffice already.

Cheers, Phil