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

From: Ed Santiago <santiago@redhat.com>
Date: Apr 14, 2010, 21:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20100414214229.GA31757@f.santiago.vpn.redhat.com>
In-Reply-To: <m27ho9sr0i.fsf@igel.home>

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:44:45PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Ed Santiago <santiago@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > Question mark character appears to be valid in a CVS tag,
> 
> According to the CVS docs only letters, digits, '-' and '_' are valid
> for tag names.

Poor choice of words on my part. What I *should* have said is something like:

   Although question marks and curly braces are not among the
   set of characters which CVS considers to be valid for a tag,
   real-world situations have been encontered in which a CVS
   comma-v file has a tag including all those characters.  This
   patch makes git-cvsimport accept and forgive that reality.

How that tag got created, I really don't know. I can imagine three ways it could've happened (rcs commands; broken/old version of CVS; custom tool for mucking with comma-v files). My goal was to recognize that this sort of thing happens, and to make it easier for the next person to find & fix this in the script. With that goal in mind, removing $! and adding the comment is the only important part of my patch. The question mark itself is not likely to be useful except in very rare and weird cases.

Ed

-- 
Ed Santiago             Software Engineer             santiago@redhat.com