Re: [PATCH 6/5] NUL hack to create_file()

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: May 29, 2008, 07:23 UTC
Message-ID: <483E59FE.80707@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <483E55C1.1000900@trolltech.com>

Marius Storm-Olsen schrieb:

Show 19 quoted lines

> Johannes Sixt said the following on 29.05.2008 08:33:
>> Junio C Hamano schrieb:
>>> This is not meant for application to the mainline.  It allows your
>>> git to
>>> refuse to create a blob whose name is "nul".
>>
>> It's not just about "nul"; these won't work either: "aux", "prn", "con",
>> "com\d+", "lpt\d+", neither do "$one_of_these.$some_extension". And
>> all of
>> that regardless of the case!
>>
>> See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx
>>
>> Definitely, we don't ever want to have such special-casing somewhere
>> in git.
> 
> They _can_ be used by using the UNC notation:
>     \\?\<drive letter>:\<path>\nul
> Do you think we should special-case that, or simply fail?

Rhetoric question: What's so special about those files?

"foo/nul" is a file you don't have permissions to write to. Period. We should fail the same way as if you had 'chmod a-w foo/nul foo', or as if there's a bad sector on the disk. Junio's patch series is the way to go (without 6/5, of course).

-- Hannes