Re: [PATCH] Geolocation support

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 9, 2015, 19:13 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqlhk6c2zd.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CACBZZX5rgah7Ucek8dicaDeqvjdkR5ybBC5O7PUxE8+KBwrpgA@mail.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 2:24 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> In case I was not clear, I do not think it is likely for us to accept
>> a patch that mucks with object header fields with this information.
>> Have them in the log text and let UI interpret them.
>
> We've already told clients for a long time to ignore fields they don't
> know about,

Yes, but the reason that mechanism is there is not because we want to add random cruft Git does not have to know about. It is to avoid older Git from suddenly stop working when we really need to add new essential things.

This was discussed in great length on this list already.

cf. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/138848/focus=138852

More importantly, adding non-essential stuff left and right will force third party Git reimplementations to pay attention to them and also will leave room for them to make mistakes when deciding what to propagate, what to drop and what to update when rewriting commits via rebase, cherry-pick, etc.

> why would we not store what's intended to be
> machine-readable key-value pair data in the commit object itself,

I think this sentence gets it backwards. The question to ask is if it is an arbitrary cruft that the end users are better off if they can easily typofix in the commit message log editor, or is it essential for Git to operate correctly and end users shouldn't be allowed to muck with in the editor?

>> The expected location format is "CITY, COUNTRY (LAT, LON)".

I would expect that I can typofix "Les Angeles" to "Los Angeles", if I were using this feature.