Re: [StGit PATCH] Parse commit object header correctly

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2012, 17:51 UTC
Message-ID: <20120209175158.GA7384@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <CAHkRjk6dr=5wxm+iSC2_CSB-q3k2WG_Um+X7dwsy-H8tL508EA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Catalin,

Catalin Marinas wrote:

> Thanks for looking into this. Is this the same as an email header? If
> yes, we could just use the python's email.Header.decode_header()
> function (I haven't tried yet).

They look like this:

	encoding ISO8859-1

> BTW, does Git allow custom headers to be inserted by tools like StGit?

No. There is one list of supported headers, and this list is the standards body that maintains it[*]. So if you end up needing an extension to the commit object format, that can be done, but it needs to be accepted here (and ideally checked by "git fsck", though it's lagging a bit in that respect lately).

By the way, headers have a standard order to avoid spurious changes in commit names from reordering. Additions so far have always happened at the end, which is what makes checks by "git fsck" possible --- it can't rule out an unrecognized header line being a standard field from a future version of git, but it would be allowed to complain about unrecognized fields before 'encoding', for example.

Thanks, Jonathan

[*] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/138848/focus=138892