Re: [PATCH 4/4] Add 'filter' attribute and external filter driver definition.

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, David Lang wrote:

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

David Lang [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

1. it would be useful in many cases for the filter program to know
what file it's working on (and probably some other things), so there
are probably some command-line arguments that should be able to be
passed to the filter.

I can see that you missed the class when Linus talked about how
messy things would get once you allow the conversion to be
stateful.  I was in the class and remembered it ;-)

Although I initially considered interpolating "%P" with
pathname, I ended up deciding against it, to discourage people
from abusing the filter for stateful conversion that changes the
results depending on time, pathname, commit, branch and stuff.

I didn't miss it, I just don't think that the path in the repository is 
nessasarily as dangerous as the other things (time, branch, etc)

to clarify a bit more. I have a perl program that I can point at the 
'interesting' files on my systems and have it create a 'generic' version of that 
file. I can then take that generic version of the file to any machine in the 
cluster and with the same program create a version of that generic file that's 
correct for the other system. however to know which substatutions are 
appropriate to do for the file, it needs to know the filename (well, I guess I 
could create a whole bunch of seperate config files, and then define all the 
files with different filters, each filter including the config file to use fo 
rthat specific file, but this seems like a really ugly way to do it)

one thing that was listed as a possibilty was to use the sha1 of the file, 
but you would force the filter to calculate that itself. it's already 
available when extracting and recalcuating it is a waste

ignore this comment, I see you posted an example of this.

David Lang