Re: Clarifying "invalid tag signature file" error message from git filter-branch (and others)

["James Youngman" <jay@gnu.org>]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil> wrote:
> James Youngman wrote:
>> What do the errors "error: char88: malformed tagger field" and "fatal:
>> invalid tag signature file" and "Could not create new tag object for
>> FINDUTILS-4_1-10" signify in the session below?
>
> It means the tagger field in the tag does not follow the correct form.
> Specifically the testing in git-mktag (called by filter-branch) does:
>
>         * Check for correct form for name and email
>         * i.e. " <" followed by "> " on _this_ line
>         * No angle brackets within the name or email address fields.
>         * No spaces within the email address field.
>
> What does 'git cat-file tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10' show you?

Before conversion:
$ git cat-file tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
object ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2
type commit
tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
tagger Kevin Dalley

The conversion:

After conversion:
$ git cat-file tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
object ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2
type commit
tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
tagger Kevin Dalley

This is in the repo at
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=findutils.git;a=commit;h=ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2

>> Are any of those errors correctable (I can re-run the tree rewrite
>> script as many times as needed, I'm just using it on a test repository
>> for now).
>
> If there are only a few, then you can manually retag with a corrected
> tagger field, and then run your script.
>
> Of course, depending on the output of the cat-file call above, the
> testing in git-mktag may need to be relaxed.
>
> -brandon
>