Re: [PATCH] git-cvsimport: strip question-mark characters in tags

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 07:29:03AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I considered that but decided that it was beyond the scope of what I wanted to tackle. My intent was to suggest an incremental fix, not a revolutionary one. I also wished to remove a misleading diagnostic[1] and provide a way for others to do the same as needed.

 [1] The error I saw was "Cannot create tag mumblefoo{?dist}: Illegal seek",
     where "Illegal seek" is due to an uninitialized/invalid $!

A proper solution would, I believe, be uncomfortably complex. Some of the approaches I considered are:

  * command-line option '--tag-replace <from-char>=<to>', eg '?=-'
  * replacing a (hardcoded) list of chars with %xx hex codes
  * option a la -A, with a file listing <oldtag>=<newtag>
  * like above, but the file lists perl expressions such as s/\?/./g

I used git-cvsimport because I've used tailor[2] before and dreaded the thought of running it again. I love how easy git-cvsimport was to use! I see it as a great tool for quick jobs, for proof-of-concept situations: it has a low cost of entry, works well with a remote CVS repo, and was easy to debug. But if it were to become as configurable -- and as complex -- as tailor, I think it might lose much of its value.

 [2] http://wiki.darcs.net/RelatedSoftware/Tailor

Eek, no. Again, this was a purely incremental fix, an addition to an existing (simple) check. Duplicating the functionality of git-check-ref-format would be a terrible idea. But if there's already a perlified library for this, or a portable hook into git itself (I haven't looked), it might be wise to have git-cvsimport use that to check/convert tags. At the very least it would give a much better error to the end user.

My apologies.  I'm new to this.

How would you like me to proceed? I'm reluctant to code a full general solution to the tag-validity problem, but am happy to rework my changes into something better.

Thanks for your feedback, Ed