Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.29.0-rc1

From: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Date: Oct 10, 2020, 16:45 UTC
Message-ID: <ce8f482f-9a78-6867-38ae-601bcc2c9f66@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7drzv1bn.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

Am 09.10.20 um 17:58 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

>  * "git archive" learns the "--add-file" option to include untracked
>    files into a snapshot from a tree-ish.

>       archive: read short blobs in archive.c::write_archive_entry()
>       archive: add --add-file
>       Makefile: use git-archive --add-file

Oh, this feature landed quickly, with little discussion. I dropped the ball while being distracted by other things and working on supporting other use cases, like dist-doc and artifacts-tar.

The option --add-file in rc1 is peculiar in that it captures the value of --prefix at the time of left-to-right parsing. I don't know any other option that does that. It gives users a way to craft in-archive paths, but simply adding them with their original path (just normalized to use slashes as directory separators) would probably suffice.

The option serves a niche use case, so this weirdness might be bearable, but I wouldn't have expected it to be merged without debate. Perhaps we want to slap an "experimental" label on it?

We can create the dist-doc tars easily without --add-file and tar(1); patch forthcoming.

We could do the same for artifacts-tar, but that would generate a huge archive due to the many hardlinks for dash aliases that are flattened into copies. Implementing hardlink support might be worthwhile anyway and we would not even have to make it optional. This target doesn't use TAR_DIST_EXTRA_OPTS, so this is a separate topic anyway, though.

René