Re: [PATCH 7/7] archive: provide builtin .tar.gz filter

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 08:56:21AM +0100, Chris Webb wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

No, I mean that people may _want_ the timestamp in day to day use. Using
"-n" all the time suppresses it. And there is no reason to suppress it,
except that our test does not account for it properly. So your patch is
hurting people who don't want "-n" (i.e., want the timestamp) just to
make our test happy.

It's useful to omit the timestamp outside of git too. Source-based package
management systems generally store a URL from which to fetch a source
tarball, and a hash of that source tarball to ensure it hasn't been tampered
with. It's nice to be able to use a gitweb URL like

  http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=snapshot;h=e5af0de202e885b793482d416b8ce9d50dd2b8bc;sf=tgz

as the tarball source, and still be able to verify its integrity against a
prestored hash.

OK. I'm totally willing to accept that people actually prefer the "-n"
behavior. I don't care either way myself. I just don't want the reason
to default to "-n" to be "because our test scripts need it" and not
"because this is what people actually want".

-Peff