Re: [regression] Re: git-cat-file --batch reversion; cannot query filenames with spaces

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 2, 2013, 20:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20130802200529.GA2963@elie.Belkin>
In-Reply-To: <7vmwp0osic.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Here is what is on top of the revert that has been pushed out on
> 'pu'.

For what it's worth,
Reviewed-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>

[...]

> To remain backwards compatible, we cannot split on whitespace by
> default, hence we will ship 1.8.4 with the commit reverted.

[...]

Show 5 quoted lines

> It might be more robust to have something like "-z" to separate the
> input elements. But this patch is still a reasonable step before
> having that.  It makes the easy cases easy; people who do not care
> about %(rest) do not have to consider it, and the %(rest) code
> handles the spaces and newlines of "rev-list --objects" correctly.

Another idea for the future might be to start rejecting refnames starting with a double-quote '"', which would make it safe to treat a leading quote-mark as the start of a C-style quoted string. But currently that would technically be a breaking change, making "-z" more useful in the meantime.

I think several commands already don't deal well with filenames with newlines. I hope POSIX forbids them (with some suitable migration plan) soonish and even wouldn't mind if git were taught to refuse to track them.

Thanks, Jonathan