Re: [PATCH v2 4/5] refs/reftable: add fsck check for trailing newline

> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Introduce a fsck check for the reftable backend, which checks if the
> > 'tables.list' contains a newline. The reftable backend writes a trailing
> > newline when writing the 'tables.list', but it doesn't check for it when
> > reading the file. A missing newline however indicates that the file was
> > manually tampered with, so let's raise this as an error to the user.
> 
> Hmph, how does the code react to other kinds of "manual tampering"?
> For example, if an empty line is inserted between two existing lines
> (or at the beginning of the file, for that matter), would the parser
> detect it as a corrupt file and die?
> 
> If so, it makes me strongly suspect that we are better off enforcing
> that the file does not end in an incomplete line at runtime and barf
> just the same way, instead of "most of the anomalies that the write
> codepath would never produce would cause error on the read codepath,
> but only this one that the read codepath is happy with is caught by
> the fsck", which does not sound quite right.