Re: [PATCH] blame: Improve parsing for emails with spaces

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 29, 2011, 17:59 UTC
Message-ID: <7vvcxxvsz4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110429131103.GB4540@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 03:07:36PM -0700, Josh Stone wrote:
>
>> One of my git repositories has some old commits where the authors
>> obfuscated their email address as <author at example dot com>.  To
>> handle this, blame needs to look for the leading '<' when scanning
>> to split the "name <email>", rather then only a space delimiter.

Given that we enclose the e-mail inside "<>" pair and excise "<" from author names in fmt_ident(), I think it makes sense to look for " <" like this patch does.

> Hmm. That address seems bogus, and I wonder if we should be rejecting it
> at commit time. Still, it is something we may run across in existing
> repositories, so handling it more gracefully makes sense.

Perhaps but within reason.

What new types of breakages are we proposing to tolerate, what breakages are we declaring not worth fixing, and what is the price of not loosening this? Without this patch, such a broken commit will result in the author email shown somewhat broken, but the original is already broken to begin with, and also the entry for the blamed line will come with its commit object name anyway, so I do not think it is such a big deal.

It would be an entirely different issue if the command barfed and refused to blame the file.

> Looking over the other places we parse author info, I don't think the
> same problem exists elsewhere. Most other places parse from left to
> right, and just go to the closing ">".

Because fmt_ident() removes "<" or ">" from given email address, I think it is sufficient.

It would be nice to have an abstraction around the parsing in a way similar to fmt_ident() is an abstraction around the formatting, but that would be a separate topic.