Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] sideband: add options to allow more control sequences to be passed through

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 15, 2026, 21:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20260115211448.GF1053259@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <aWKLrIefrcSwReu2@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 05:26:04PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> The reason these sequences, along with other sequences not mentioned in
> this series, are useful is because people run tools like build tools
> (e.g., Cargo) or linters in pre-receive hooks and print the output and
> those use a substantial portion of possible escape sequences.  I did a
> brief survey sometime back of pre-receive hooks on GitHub to see what
> escape sequences were in use.
> 
> I think Heroku has a push-to-deploy technique that leverages this
> approach to build and deploy your app, for instance.
> 
> This is one of the reasons that I was opposed to this series: it tends
> to break what is a very common use case.  Certainly it is not as common
> for cloud-based forge environments, but it is very common for people to
> do these kinds of things in self-hosted forge environments (where custom
> pre-receive hooks are commonly used) or in non-forge environments like
> push-to-deploy.

I also share your concern that real-world cases may be relying on these. But I am also sympathetic that some people may prefer to risk breakage (or ugliness) if it might protect them from misleading or mischievous terminal trickery.

Is there any reason we cannot introduce the new functionality as a config option but _not_ enable it by default?

That gives people the tools to protect themselves if they want to bear the potential cost. It just feels a shame to deny them the tool because we can't agree on the default.

-Peff