Re: [PATCH 2/2] fast-import: validate entire ident string

"Shawn O. Pearce" [off-list ref] writes:

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The author, committer, and tagger name and email should not include
any embedded <, >, or newline characters.  The format of the
identification string is

  ('author'|'committer'|'tagger') sp name sp < email > sp date

If an object has no name attached, then git expects to find two spaces
in a row.

This is going to be a problem I think.  Some importers are probably
writing "committer <bob> ...." when pulling from systems that don't
have a concept of name vs. email (e.g. CVS or SVN).  I highly suspect
that requiring two spaces here will cause a lot of importers to fail.

If we really need to require two spaces, I think we need to honor
the documented input format but rewrite the line inside of the
import process to match the two space convention.

It probably should document [sp name] (or [name sp]) an "zero or one"
item, if we want to be lenient.

I also think it may not be such a bad idea to allow fast-import to add a
phoney "name" by taking everything in e-mail before the first '@', just
like how the git-cvsimport and git-svn does, when the input stream does
not have a "name".  I am not sure how usable "shortlog" output would be
otherwise, without any "name" field.