[Cosmo-dev] Bug 11081

[Travis Vachon]

Hi folks

Several people woke up this morning to a broken office calendar on  
Hub. We've traced the problem to bug 11081. Fortunately, we were able  
to fix Hub for now by deleting a few nasty characters, so we're up  
and running again.

There was a consensus on IRC that this is a pretty nasty bug and  
should be fixed soon. Appropriate fixes are discussed in the bug, but  
the short story is that we could fix this on the server side or the  
client side.

The server side fix would require patching our JSON library. This  
wouldn't be hard, but I'd need a little assistance from Bear, as I've  
never patched and deployed one of our Java dependencies before.

The client side fix would require patching Dojo. Probably the best  
way to do this would be to add a build time patch that would make the  
necessary tweak.

I'm currently leaning toward the server side fix since it appears to  
be more elegant (our JSON library already does some escaping, so this  
would just be a couple additional cases in a switch statement) but  
I'd like to hear input from other folks as well.

I'm also going to email the author of the JSON spec, Douglas  
Crockford, to get his take. Conventional wisdom has it that all valid  
JSON is valid Ecmascript, and this particular bug appears to be an  
exception to that rule, so I'd like to follow up to make sure we're  
not missing anything.

Finally, we need some input from the bug council as to when this fix  
should land. If we want to go for 0.8 we'll need to roll another rc.  
I could probably have this fix ready by the end of today. Given how  
rare these characters appear to be in the wild, I don't think it  
would be a disaster to wait for 0.9 to roll this out.


Comments/questions?

-Travis