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

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

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net> wrote:
> "James Youngman" <jay@gnu.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil> wrote:
>>
>>>> Before conversion:
>>>> $ git cat-file tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
>>>> object ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2
>>>> type commit
>>>> tag FINDUTILS-4_1-10
>>>> tagger Kevin Dalley
>>>
>>> The tagger field is missing an email address, a timestamp, and a timezone. It
>>> should look something like:
>>>
>>>  tagger Kevin Dalley <kevin.dalley@somewhere.com> 1229036026 -0800
>>>
>>> git-mktag prevents improperly formatted tags from being created by checking
>>> that these fields exist and are well formed.
>>>
>>> If you know the correct values for the missing fields, then you could
>>
>> Yes for the email address.      But as for the timestamp, it's not in
>> the tag file; that only contains the sha1.
>> There is a timestamp in the object being tagged, is that the timestamp
>> you are talking about?
>>
>> $ git show --pretty=raw  ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2
>> commit ce25eb352de8dc53a9a7805ba9efc1c9215d28c2
>> tree 752cca144d39bc55d05fbe304752b274ba22641c
>> parent 9a998755249b0c8c47e8657cff712fa506aa30fc
>> author Kevin Dalley <kevin@seti.org> 830638152 +0000
>> committer Kevin Dalley <kevin@seti.org> 830638152 +0000
>>
>>     *** empty log message ***
>>
>> diff --git a/debian.Changelog b/debian.Changelog
>> index e3541eb..d0cd295 100644
>> --- a/debian.Changelog
>> +++ b/debian.Changelog
>> @@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
>>  Sat Apr 27 12:29:06 1996  Kevin Dalley
>> <kevin@aplysia.iway.aimnet.com (Kevin Dalley)>
>>
>> +       * find.info, find.info-1, find.info-2: updated to match find.texi
>> +
>>         * debian.rules (debian): update debian revision to 10
>>
>>         * getline.c (getstr): verify that nchars_avail is *really* greater
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> recreate the tags before doing the filter-branch. If they are unknown, it
>>> seems valid enough to use the values from the commit that the tag points
>>> to.
>>>
>>> i.e.
>>>
>>>  tagger Kevin Dalley <kevin@seti.org> 830638152 -0000
>>>
>>> What tool was used to convert this repository to git? It should be corrected
>>> to produce valid annotated tags. Especially if it is a tool within git.
>>
>> I don't know, Jim Meyering will know though, so I CC'ed him.
>
> I used parsecvs, probably with git-master from the date of
> the initial conversion (check the archives for actual date).
> That was long enough ago that it was almost certainly before
> git-mktag learned to be more strict about its inputs.
>
> James, since you're about to rewrite the history, you may want to
> start that process from a freshly-cvs-to-git-converted repository.

Maybe, but then afaik CVS tags don't have timestamps, so some of the
data that git-mktag seems to want doesn't exist anyway.

But until we know the answer to the next question, I don't think we
know how we would generate such a freshly-converted repository.

> I'm not very happy about using cvsparse (considering it's not
> really being maintained, afaik), so if the git crowd
> can recommend something better, I'm all ears.

Thanks,
James.