Re: "git archve --format=tar" output changed from 1.8.1 to 1.8.2.1

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 31, 2013, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzjzpgswz.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130131172805.GC16593@kroah.com>

Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

> The way we upload the Linux kernel to kernel.org involves creating a tar
> archive, signing the archive, and then just uploading the signature.
> The server then checks out the repo based on the tag, generates the tar
> archive and checks the signature to make sure they match.
> 
> A few days ago I released the 3.0.61 kernel, and it turned out that I
> couldn't upload the kernel release because 'git archive' now creates a
> binary file that differs from an older version of git.
> ...
> Now keeping binary compatibility of tar archive files isn't really a big
> deal, but, the commit to git that causes this seems a bit odd, is it
> really needed?  Or can we just fix the version of tar with NetBSD
> instead?  :)
>
> Any ideas?

How about fixing kup to teach the "let's cheat and let the other end run 'git archive', if the resulting archive and GPG signature locally created does match, we do not have to transfer the tarball itself" trick a fall-back mode that says "but if the signature does not match, then transfer the bulk used to create the signature to the remote anyway". This fallback can and should of course be useful for the compressed patch transfer.