Re: A shortcoming of the git repo format

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 11:03:26AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
 > Linus Torvalds wrote:
 > >
 > >On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
 > >
 > >>One solution to all of this would be to define a quoting standard for 
 > >>strings, and simply require that all free-format strings (like the 
 > >>author fields) or at least strings that match [0-9a-f]{20}, are always 
 > >>quoted.
 > >
 > >
 > >git uses more of the ".newsrc" format, in that it just knows which 
 > >characters are legal or not.
 > >
 > >To find the email address, look for the first '<'. To find the date, look 
 > >for the first '>'. Those characters are not allowed in the name or the 
 > >email, so they act as well-defined delimeters.
 > >
 > 
 > That's true for email addresses, but the point was to distinguish links 
 > to other git objects from any other kind of text.  Currently there is no 
 > such delimiter for that.

That actually broke one of my first git scripts when one of the changelog texts started a line with 'tree '. I hacked around it by making my script only grep in the 'head -n4' lines, but this seems somewhat fragile having to make assumptions that the field I want to see is in the first 4 lines.

		Dave