Re: [PATCH] git-cvsimport: strip question-mark characters in tags

[Ed Santiago <santiago@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 07:29:03AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> I agree that people may want to optionally replace them to avoid mapping
> two originally different tags into the same one.

I considered that but decided that it was beyond the scope of
what I wanted to tackle.  My intent was to suggest an incremental
fix, not a revolutionary one.  I also wished to remove a misleading
diagnostic[1] and provide a way for others to do the same as needed.

 [1] The error I saw was "Cannot create tag mumblefoo{?dist}: Illegal seek",
     where "Illegal seek" is due to an uninitialized/invalid $!

A proper solution would, I believe, be uncomfortably complex.
Some of the approaches I considered are:

  * command-line option '--tag-replace <from-char>=<to>', eg '?=-'
  * replacing a (hardcoded) list of chars with %xx hex codes
  * option a la -A, with a file listing <oldtag>=<newtag>
  * like above, but the file lists perl expressions such as s/\?/./g

I used git-cvsimport because I've used tailor[2] before and
dreaded the thought of running it again.  I love how easy
git-cvsimport was to use!  I see it as a great tool for
quick jobs, for proof-of-concept situations: it has a low
cost of entry, works well with a remote CVS repo, and was
easy to debug.  But if it were to become as configurable -- and
as complex -- as tailor, I think it might lose much of its value.

 [2] http://wiki.darcs.net/RelatedSoftware/Tailor

> Does your regexp chain check other invalid refname sequences, such as ".name",
> "na..me", etc.?

Eek, no.  Again, this was a purely incremental fix, an addition
to an existing (simple) check.  Duplicating the functionality
of git-check-ref-format would be a terrible idea.  But if there's
already a perlified library for this, or a portable hook into
git itself (I haven't looked), it might be wise to have
git-cvsimport use that to check/convert tags.  At the very
least it would give a much better error to the end user.

> Sign-off?

My apologies.  I'm new to this.

How would you like me to proceed?  I'm reluctant to code a
full general solution to the tag-validity problem, but am
happy to rework my changes into something better.

Thanks for your feedback,
Ed
-- 
Ed Santiago             Software Engineer             santiago@redhat.com