Re: [git-for-windows] Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git for Windows 2.9.3

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 24, 2016, 05:09 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbn0iu50a.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1608231758260.4924@virtualbox>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> The feature in question is also highly unlikely to be used as much by
> non-Windows users as by Windows users due to the unfortunate choice of the
> default setting for core.autocrlf.

My vague recollection from some years ago was that even among those who were active in msysGit development there were people who advocated for straight-thru and others who wanted core.autocrlf as the default, but I do not know the current state of the affairs.

In any case, in the ideal future, I would imagine that we would want to have "cat-file blob" to enable "--filters" by default; that would make cat-file and hash-objects a pair of symmetric operations.

That certainly will not happen within 2.x timeframe, and the new "cat-file --filter" feature can appear in 2.11 at the earliest, but I think by that time (or with a few more cycles) we may have a handful other improvements that are backward incompatible lined up to urge us to think about bumping the version number to 3.0. I recall writing "Will keep in next to see if anybody screams" a few times already, and they are all good excuses to invite a version bump.

To prepare for that future, we would probably want to start updating in-tree scripts (including the tests) so that they call "cat-file --no-filter blob" whereever they currently say "cat-file blob" in or soon after 2.11. Of course, if some of them currently pipe "cat-file blob" output to munge it to produce what --filters would have done (I didn't check), we would want to rewrite them to use the new feature "cat-file --filter blob" when we do so. In short, there won't be any "cat-file blob" call that does not have either --filters or --no-filters, except the ones we write specifically to check the updated default behaviour when that happens.

Would that sound like a good longer-term plan?