Re: [PATCH 1/1] cat-file: quote-format name in error when using -z

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 12, 2022, 00:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq8rjdv5um.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <ddae1940-f58f-e410-7606-d0bcf8d06cd3@dunelm.org.uk>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

> Without "-z" you cannot pass object names that contain newlines so not
> quoting the output does not cause a problem. We could start quoting
> the object name without "-z" but we'd be changing the output without a
> huge benefit.

That's fair. The next question is from a devil's advocate: is switching to the full cquote the best thing to do?

If we were using the full cquote from the very beginning, of course it is, simply because that is what is used in all other places in Git. Using the full cquote does mean a LF byte will be protected (i.e. instead of shown literally in the middle of other letters around LF, "other\nletters around LF" would be shown), but pathnames with backslashes and double quotes in them that have been shown without problems would be shown differently and will break existing parsers, which are written lazily with the assumption that they are perfectly happy to be "simple" thans to not having to deal with LF (because in their environment a path with LF in it do not matter).

A bit safer thing to do is to replace LF (and not any other bytes that would be quoted with full cquote) in the path given in these messages with something else (like NUL to truncate the output there). As these answers are given in order, the object names are not absolutely needed to identify and match up the input and the output, and properly written parsers would be prepared to see a response with an object name that it did not request and handle it sanely, such a change may not break such a parser for a path with any byte that are modified with full cquote.

The above is with a devil's adovocate hat on, and I do not care too much, as I do not think butchering backslash with full cquote would not hurt even existing Windows users (if "HEAD:t\README.txt" named the same blob as "HEAD:t/README.txt" on a platform, doubling the backslashes in the output would have made quite a lot of damage, but I do not think we allow backslashes to name tree paths).

By the way, there is another use of obj_name in batch_object_write() that can show whatever byte in it literally to the output.

Thanks.