From: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Standardized escaping to store a .git in git?
Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 14:00:52 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <YKV8hEAxIzolnROX@localhost> (raw)
On rare occasions, a project may need to store and version a .git
directory in a git repository. For instance, a project that interacts
with git repositories may need test cases. Or, a project using git to
store backups may also want to back up git repositories. `.git` is the
only filename that git can't transparently store and version.
I've seen projects take different approaches to work around this. For
instance, the libgit2 project renames the `.git` directory to `.gitted`,
and then their test framework copies that to a temporary directory as
`.git`.
Would it make sense to have a standardized escaping mechanism for this,
that git could then standardize the handling of in a safe way (taking
both project configuration and local configuration into account)? Such a
mechanism would not, by default, result in git checking out a `.git`
directory verbatim, as that wouldn't be safe (due to hook scripts and
due to searches for .git directories), but a user could configure their
own system to do so for a specific project, tools like `git archive`
could have a way to un-escape the directory in a generated archive, and
references to objects within a treeish could use such paths.
Standardizing this would allow tools to interoperate rather than each
inventing their own convention.
(Note that today, git *can* successfully check in, version, update, and
check out a bare repo.git directory, just not a non-bare .git
directory.)
As one possible escaping (absolutely subject to bikeshedding):
- Reserve names starting with a specified character (e.g. \x01); call
that escape character E.
- Encode filenames that actually start with E to start with EE
- Encode .git as E.git
- Require an opt-in to interpret this escaping; tools that don't
interpret this escaping will still be able to operate on the files, in
much the same way that it's possible to operate on a symlink as if it
were a file containing the target path.
There are tradeoffs here: using a more type-able escape character would
be convenient if a user ever had to deal with the raw name, but on the
other hand, using a more type-able escape character would make the need
to escape the escape character come up more often.
Regardless of the specific approach to escaping `.git`, does the general
idea of standardizing such escaping across tools seem like something git
could potentially do, to allow transparently storing *any* file or
directory in a git repository?
- Josh Triplett
next reply other threads:[~2021-05-19 21:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-05-19 21:00 Josh Triplett [this message]
2021-05-19 21:31 ` Standardized escaping to store a .git in git? Jonathan Nieder
2021-05-19 22:08 ` Josh Triplett
2021-05-19 22:37 ` Jonathan Nieder
2021-05-20 3:26 ` Josh Triplett
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