Confused about "ident" filter

Confused about "ident" filter

[Peter Karlsson]

Hi!

While convincing my employer to convert to Git, I've ran into the old
RCS keyword expansion problem again. They have files that they need to
export to a customer, without revision history, but they need to embed
an identifier that can tell them which version of the file it was.

So, I tried setting up a .gitattributes file:

   * ident

and a simple test perl script that would show me the ident:

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   print 'I am $Id$', "\n";

but I cannot figure out how to get it to actually expand the $Id$. I
tried doing "git checkout test.perl", I tried "git clone" to get a new
copy of the repository, but still it showed only "$Id$".

I found that "git archive" *does* work.

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/

Re: Confused about "ident" filter

[Paolo Bonzini]

Peter Karlsson wrote:
> I tried doing "git checkout test.perl", I tried "git clone" to get a new
> copy of the repository, but still it showed only "$Id$".

In fact I'm a little confused too.  The only way I found to expand 
"$Id$" consistently was "rm test.perl; git checkout test.perl", or "rm 
test.perl; git reset --hard HEAD".

I was not so surprised that clone did not expand, though IMHO it is a 
bug -- but I was *very* surprised to see that cloning a bare repository 
did not expand, either.

Paolo

Re: Confused about "ident" filter

[Jakub Narebski]

Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org> writes:

> Peter Karlsson wrote:
> > I tried doing "git checkout test.perl", I tried "git clone" to get a new
> > copy of the repository, but still it showed only "$Id$".
> 
> In fact I'm a little confused too.  The only way I found to expand
> "$Id$" consistently was "rm test.perl; git checkout test.perl", or "rm
> test.perl; git reset --hard HEAD".

I think that "git checkout -f test.perl" should work, forcing git to
replace existing file.

As to clone problem: it might be chicken and egg problem, with `ident`
filter needing .gitattribites in working directory during checkout
phase (currently there is no way to use gitattributes from a tree in
repository), and checkout writing this file.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git