Re: git archive setting user and group

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 22 2021, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 10:00:04PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote:
>> Adding support for using a custom user and group should be easy.  Is
>> this just a cosmetic thing?  Regular users would ignore the user info in
>> the archive, and root should not be used for extracting, and on systems
>> that don't have a logwatch user this wouldn't make a difference anyway,
>> right?
>
> Right now, "git archive" operations are bit-for-bit identical across all
> versions going back at least 8+ years. In fact, we've been relying on this to
> support bundling tarball signatures with git tags themselves (via git notes).
> E.g. you can see this in action here:
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tag/?h=v5.10.9
>
> If you click on "(sig)", you will download a signature that can be used to
> verify the tarball generated using "git archive".
>
> I would argue that adding user/group support to "git archive" operation is
> not really solving any problems other than "it's different from when I run it
> as a regular user" -- and can introduce potential compatibility problems if
> implemented.
>
> So, I would selfishly vote not to implement this.

It seems "logwatch" has the same situation, except their backwards
compatibility is with non-"git archive" tool that used user != root.

If it solves a problem for some users and someone comes up with a patch
I don't see why it shouldn't be implemented, but I think it's important
that "root" is the default unless configured or the relevant option is
invoked.

Or do you mean that the kernel.org use-case is that users are expected
to run "git archive" on their own machines and upload the result to
kernel.org, and that kernel.org relies on two such files bit-for-bit
identical?