Re: [PATCH 0/3] tag: keep the message file in case ref transaction fails

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 17, 2023, 17:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20230517173709.GA535409@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqo7mjq779.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 09:00:10AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > I dunno. There is a certain elegance to telling the user about what
> > progress we _did_ make, but if there isn't an easy way to turn that into
> > a retry of their command, it may not be all that useful.
> 
> Yeah, I am OK with "leaving TAG_EDITMSG behind" and a future "tag
> -c/-C $another" to coexist.

Me too.

One thing I wondered is whether the obvious command to retry:

  git tag -F .git/TAG_EDITMSG foo

would work, or if we would overwrite the file before it is read. But it does work, which is good. I wonder if we:

  a. want to protect that with a test (since I could imagine a
     refactoring where we try to copy the "-F" contents from file to
     file, rather than reading it into a memory buffer ahead of time)

  b. want to tell users that is a good way to recover (though maybe that
     is a rabbit hole of details as one subtlety is that it will be
     overwritten by an unrelated tag command).

But I am also happy to leave it to the user's imagination to pull the contents from the file with "cp" or their editor. :)

-Peff