Re: Stability of git-archive, breaking (?) the Github universe, and a possible solution

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Date: Jan 31, 2023, 15:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20230131150555.ewiwsbczwep6ltbi@meerkat.local>
In-Reply-To: <Y9jlWYLzZ/yy4NqD@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 09:54:58AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> I'm one of the GitHub employees who chimed in there, and I'm also a Git
> contributor in my own time (and I am speaking here only in my personal
> capacity, since this is a personal address).  I made a change some years
> back to the archive format to fix the permissions on pax headers when
> extracted as files, and kernel.org was relying on that and broke.  Linus
> yelled at me because of that.
> 
> Since then, I've been very opposed to us guaranteeing output format
> consistency without explicitly doing so.  I had sent some patches before
> that I don't think ever got picked up that documented this explicitly.
> I very much don't want people to come to rely on our behaviour unless we
> explicitly guarantee it.

I understand your position, but I also think it's one of those things that happen despite your best efforts to prevent it. :)

May I suggest adding a "git-archive --stable" that offers this guarantee, simply as a matter of codifying the fact that the world has built infrastructure around git's repeatable output. Maybe just for .tar (and .tar.gz).

I know this complicates the code and makes it more "expensive" to maintain, but it would be dramatically less expensive than changing the established practices around the world.

-K