Re: Bug: rebase when an author uses accents in name on MacOSx

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 08:56:01AM -0500, Lanny Ripple wrote:

> I did show that sed was broken and have provided a minimal, reproducible test.
> 
> I have reported it to the sed maintainers and they are working on it.

Great. Do we know yet which versions are affected?

> A message or comment in the code that seds not properly handling utf8
> characters have been shown to be the cause of the problem and that git
> selects sed from the PATH would have been 100% effective in at least
> one case.  I don't know the troubleshooting skills of the other two
> people that bumped into the problem so can't comment.  Of the billions
> of people that have not (if it existed) looked at the breadcrumb and
> weren't led astray it's (would have) also been 100% effective.  Can
> you in turn posit any reasonable way that get_author_ident_from_commit
> would improperly build author-script short of a bad sed?  I guess you
> could pull out transient or systematic disk error.

I assume from bogus commit objects. But I admit I am just guessing, and
don't have data.

> You do, in fact, have several solutions.  I won't reiterate since they
> are in the thread earlier.  You also have in many cases the valid
> concern that the solutions would not be backwards compatible.  And
> yes, this sed will get fixed but what then?  The next person that gets
> a sed they don't expect earlier in their PATH will have to go through
> the same steps.

When I said:

> > But really, I'd rather just see the broken sed fixed. Where would the
> > breadcrumb lead people at this point, anyway? We don't actually have a
> > solution besides "uninstall this other, crappy sed". Has the sed bug
> > actually been fixed?

I meant that there is not a fix for the _user_ to perform at that point.
The point of a breadcrumb like that is that we are not going to put a
fix into git, so we want to at least give the user a clue that their
system has a problem. But what is their next step after being informed
that their system has a problem?

-Peff