On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 4:26 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Christian Couder <christian.couder@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > information in the process. The fact that it's used to pass > > information about available features has led to a lot of user agent > > spoofing which means that analytics, statistics and debugging are > > likely harder than they need to be. > > Yes, that is a valid viewpoint, but ... > > > When Git developed capabilities and the "agent" capability, the doc > > took care of saying things that it "MUST NOT be used to > > programmatically assume the presence or absence of particular > > features". > > ... the proposed os-version thing has the same wording in its > documentation, doesn't it? Yeah, we repeat it to make sure that users read it. I am fine with refactoring that wording if we think that having it once is enough. > What is being added is not to be used > in a way that requires parsing and trusting the result. Why not? If server people want to do OS stats on their clients, for example, why shouldn't they parse and trust the result? > So unless your point is that users (like those who parse User-Agent > string by browsers) will do the wrong thing and assume these strings > are usable for feature detection anyway so we should make it easier > to parse, I'd have to disagree. We should make it easy to parse because people will use this field (otherwise why are we adding it?), and we want to make it easy to use rather than hard just because we are nice with our users. I think we should not assume that they will do the wrong thing, especially if our docs are clear about how it shouldn't be used. > If we are not aiming to make it > easier to parse and assume certain things that we do not want them > to, I do not see why we need to have the pieces of information in > two separate capabilities. I think it's just the right thing to make it easy to parse. Doing OS stats on the server side doesn't need to be unnecessarily hard. By the way, if we put the OS information in the "agent" capability, how do we separate it from the existing "package/version" content and make it easy to parse? I don't see a good solution because GIT_USER_AGENT could be used, and the config option to not show the OS name could be used too. Also we don't know what could be in the "version" part. The doc says that the agent part is typically of the form "package/version" but doesn't require it. Thanks.
