[bitbake-devel] [PATCH] wget.py: support for semi-colons in URL

[Olof Johansson]

Excerpts from Juro Bystricky's message of 2015-07-25 20:32:43 +0200:
> Some URLs contain semi-colons. For example, some GIT repositories
> support downloading snapshots using URL such as:
> 
> "http://abc123.com/git/?p=gcc/gcc.git;a=snapshot;h=a5dd47"
> 
> Currently there is no way to construct SRC_URI with such URLs.
> Bitbake uses semi-colons in SRC_URI as delimiters for various parameters.

W3C _recommends_ [1] that HTTP URL consumers treat ; in query strings as
an &:

> We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI
> implementors support the use of ";" in place of "&" to save authors
> the trouble of escaping "&" characters in this manner.

This means that

  http://abc123.com/git/?p=gcc/gcc.git;a=snapshot;h=a5dd47

and

  http://abc123.com/git/?p=gcc/gcc.git&a=snapshot&h=a5dd47

should be equivalent. I don't know how well spread this support is, or
if it works in your case, but it's a workaround if it does at least.

1: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2

-- 
olof johansson