Hi Jonathan, On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > >> Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > >>> Arguably, this is the wrong layer for that error, anyway: As long as the > >>> user never checks out the files whose names contain backslashes, there > >>> should not be any problem in the first place. > [...] > >> between the lines of this commit messages I sense that there > >> *are* repositories in the wild using these kinds of filenames. > >> > >> Can you say more about that? What repositories are affected? Do they > >> contain such filenames at HEAD or only in their history? If someone > >> wants to check out a revision with such filenames, what should happen? > > > > Yes: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/civetweb contains history where > > at some stage, by mistake, a directory was called `\`. It has been fixed a > > long time ago, but users obviously still want to be able to clone it ;-) > > Thanks. > > What should and does happen if someone tries to check out an offending > revision? To answer this question, I added this paragraph to the commit message: The idea is to prevent Git from even trying to write files with backslashes in their file names: while these characters are valid in file names on other platforms, on Windows it is interpreted as directory separator (which would obviously lead to ambiguities, e.g. when there is a file `a\b` and there is also a file `a/b`). > [...] > > I added this paragraph to the commit message: > > > > Note: just as before, the check is guarded by `core.protectNTFS` (to > > allow overriding the check by toggling that config setting), and it > > is _only_ performed on Windows, as the backslash is not a directory > > separator elsewhere, even when writing to NTFS-formatted volumes. > > > > Does that clarify the issue enough? > > It helps: that tells me why the check is only performed on Windows. > > Since this only affects Windows, please only take this review as data > about how someone read the patch. The patch doesn't make non Windows > specific code any *less* maintainable, and as a general presumption I > assume that the Git for Windows maintainer knows best about what is > needed for maintainability of Windows-specific code. > > But the commit message and docs still don't describe what the desired > behavior is. For example, should I be able to check out a revision > with a backslash in it (e.g. via Git skipping the offending entry), or > is the intended behavior for it to error out and prevent checking out > such versions of code? As mentioned above, the idea is to prevent Git from attempting to create files with illegal file name characters. > Is there anything we can or should do to prevent people checking in > new examples of paths with backslash in them (on all platforms)? As mentioned in my reply to Junio, I don't think that it would be wise to even try to warn about backslashes in the file names. There are _so_ many Git users out there, I am convinced that at least some of them have valid use cases for file names with backslashes in them. Ciao, Dscho
