On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 09:54:58AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote: > I'm one of the GitHub employees who chimed in there, and I'm also a Git > contributor in my own time (and I am speaking here only in my personal > capacity, since this is a personal address). I made a change some years > back to the archive format to fix the permissions on pax headers when > extracted as files, and kernel.org was relying on that and broke. Linus > yelled at me because of that. > > Since then, I've been very opposed to us guaranteeing output format > consistency without explicitly doing so. I had sent some patches before > that I don't think ever got picked up that documented this explicitly. > I very much don't want people to come to rely on our behaviour unless we > explicitly guarantee it. I understand your position, but I also think it's one of those things that happen despite your best efforts to prevent it. :) May I suggest adding a "git-archive --stable" that offers this guarantee, simply as a matter of codifying the fact that the world has built infrastructure around git's repeatable output. Maybe just for .tar (and .tar.gz). I know this complicates the code and makes it more "expensive" to maintain, but it would be dramatically less expensive than changing the established practices around the world. -K
