Re: renormalize histroy with smudge/clean-filter

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2025, 07:21 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BEzOWVa5zqOMuUSH5xCJ+CUk6sJnLhE5OdnDiNR0U9jfA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20250208232651.GJ30202@raven.inka.de>

On Sat, Feb 8, 2025 at 3:28 PM Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

>
> Hi Elijah,
>
> On Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 01:43:05PM -0800, Elijah Newren wrote:
>
> > Ooh, nice catch.  If folks had an appropriate .gitattributes file in
> > place in older versions of history, they probably wouldn't have gotten
> > into the mess.
>
> Well, you can't assume that paople get it right from the very start. An
> important use case of git is fixing errors made in the past, right?

[...]

Sorry if it sounded like that was passing judgement; that was not what I intended. I've been in a lot of messes too. I mean, I wrote git-filter-repo because of how many things there were to clean up. I get it, life is messy. Hindsight is 20/20. You can't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can't prioritize "everything", you have to pick your battles. Iterative improvement, etc.

> > ahah, so it is passed via environment variable to the subprocess.
>
> I find this to be confusing: the primary call should not need this parameter,
> since it is invoked from HEAD anyway.

No, the primary call I think would need the parameter too; it changes HEAD immediately when it starts rebasing, and continues changing it with each commit it rebases; since it's operating on older versions, by default it'd likely pick the .gitattributes from those older versions as it goes.

> Everything else gets it via env-vars.
> I'd assume this variable will also be passed to the commands which are invoked
> by the -x switch?

Yes, I was surprised Phillip's command with --attr-source on the outer-level git invocation worked until I discovered that the code indeed sets the environment variable (which subprocesses, like those created by the --exec/-x switch, will inherit). So, yes, the -x switch stuff seems to inherit that environment variable that the primary call sets in response to that parameter.