Originally created by: cmpilato
User Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com> ran into some trouble caused, at least to a degree, by insufficient documentation of the hard requirements around Subversion property names.
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2012-01/0274.shtml
In the past, the book has stated at different times:
"Generally speaking, the names and values of the properties can be whatever you want them to be, with the constraint that the names must be human-readable text."[1]
and
"Generally speaking, the names and values of the properties can be whatever you want them to be, with the constraint that the names must contain only ASCII characters."[2]
But neither of those is strictly accurate. Let's try to provide a precise description of what is and isn't valid in property naming. Let's also explain that while not all of Subversion's APIs and layers will prevent the use of names that don't meet the criteria, that doesn't make such usage acceptable, and newer versions of Subversion could crack down on this loose validation at any time to the ultimate frustration of the administrator who has used invalid property names.
[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s02.html
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.props.html