Re: [PATCH] Explain how svn-fe parses filenames in SVN dumps

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 14, 2012, 17:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20120414171431.GA4161@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <4F89ADCD.6000109@pileofstuff.org>

Hi,

Andrew Sayers wrote:

> Before version 1.2.0, `svn add` supported files containing characters in the
> range 0x01-0x1F, and Subversion still supports existing files that contain
> those characters.

Because of the above,

[...]

Show 14 quoted lines

> +++ b/contrib/svn-fe/svn-fe.txt
> @@ -59,6 +59,14 @@ to put each project in its own repository and to separate the history
>  of each branch.  The 'git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter' command
>  may be useful for this purpose.
>  
> +Filenames are interpreted by svn-fe as binary data, and may contain
> +any character except NUL (0x00) and newline (0x0A).  The NUL
> +character is not valid in git paths, and the newline character is
> +reserved for use by the (line-based) Subversion dumpfile format.
> +This differs from Subversion, which requires filenames to contain
> +only legal XML characters and disallows tabs characters, carriage
> +returns and newlines.
> +
>  BUGS

this description and the location of this description seem quite misleading. Isn't what the reader needs to know something like the following?

	BUGS
	----
	Due to limitations in the Subversion dumpfile format, svn-fe
	does not support filenames with newlines.  Since version 1.2.0,
	"svn add" forbids adding such filenames but some historical
	repositories contain them.  An import can appear to succeed and
	produce incorrect results when such pathological filenames are
	present.

Thanks, Jonathan