Re: git archive setting user and group

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Date: Jan 22, 2021, 21:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20210122213954.7dlnnpngjoay3oia@chatter.i7.local>
In-Reply-To: <cef51cd3-c6b5-ed24-f695-83be3a6743b4@web.de>

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 10:00:04PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Adding support for using a custom user and group should be easy.  Is
> this just a cosmetic thing?  Regular users would ignore the user info in
> the archive, and root should not be used for extracting, and on systems
> that don't have a logwatch user this wouldn't make a difference anyway,
> right?

Right now, "git archive" operations are bit-for-bit identical across all versions going back at least 8+ years. In fact, we've been relying on this to support bundling tarball signatures with git tags themselves (via git notes). E.g. you can see this in action here: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tag/?h=v5.10.9

If you click on "(sig)", you will download a signature that can be used to verify the tarball generated using "git archive".

I would argue that adding user/group support to "git archive" operation is not really solving any problems other than "it's different from when I run it as a regular user" -- and can introduce potential compatibility problems if implemented.

So, I would selfishly vote not to implement this.

-K