From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:51:00 GMT
Subject: Re: How to extract files out of a "git bundle", no matter what?
Message-ID: <20081219205100.GA26671@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <87vdtfc389.fsf@jidanni.org>

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 04:35:50AM +0800, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:

> JK>   - the object pack in the bundle is "thin", meaning it may contain
> JK>     deltas against objects that are reachable from A, but not B. So even
> JK>     _within_ a changed file, you may see only the changes from A to B.
> 
> OK, we here at the police forensics department would be very happy if
> we could at least get some ASCII out of that .BDL file, even if it is
> just a diff shred,
> -       The password to the time bomb was BLORFZ
> +       The password to the time bomb is  NORFLZ
> that would be fine. All we know is after the work PACK it is all
> binary, and git-unpack-objects and git-unpack-file don't work on it.

AFAIK, there is no tool to try salvaging strings from an incomplete pack
(and you can't just run "strings" because the deltas are zlib
compressed). So if I were in the police forensics department, I think I
would read Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt and start hacking a
solution as quickly as possible.

-Peff