Re: [PATCH] git-fetch --tags: deal with tags with spaces in them.

"H. Peter Anvin" [off-list ref] writes:

H. Peter Anvin wrote:

quoted

We can disallow whitespace, and we *have* to disallow at least
newline due to the file format; I believe we should disallow all
control characters (0-31, 127-159.)

Actually, disallowing anything 128 and above means knowing the encoding 
system.  If we enforce UTF-8, we should presumably disallow at the very 
least U+FFFE and U+FFFF too.

Hmph.  I think enforcing (or rather supporting preferentially)
UTF-8 in log messages was alright, but enforcing UTF-8 tagnames
imply UTF-8 host pathnames because we do not currently convert
when we fetch refs from remote and store locally.

 * git-clone-pack, git-fetch-pack and git-peek-remote run
   git-upload-pack on the other end.  Currently upload-pack
   sends a list of refs read from the remote filesystem without
   conversion, and:

   (1) clone-pack uses the names without conversion to replicate
       refs on the local filesystem.

   (2) fetch-pack sends the names given on the command line,
       and/or read from the local filesystem, to upload-pack
       without conversion.

   (3) fetch-pack and peek-remote outputs the names obtained
       from the remote without conversion to stdout.

 * over http, the encoding of the refnames client sees is what
   is stored in project.git/info/refs on the remote.  Currently,
   update-server-info reads from the filesystem and writes this
   file out without conversion.  While walking the commits,
   names are not used, so there is no refname encoding issues.

What we should do at this point is to declare that exchanging
refnames between systems is to happen after converting them to
UTF-8.  And version 1.0 just assumes pathnames are UTF-8.

If people on systems with non UTF-8 pathnames cared enough, the
tools can be made aware of local pathname encodings, and taught
how to convert what for_each_ref() read from the filesystem, the
refspecs given from the command line, etc. to UTF-8.  But that
can come later.