Re: Bug: rebase when an author uses accents in name on MacOSx

On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 08:56:01AM -0500, Lanny Ripple wrote:

I did show that sed was broken and have provided a minimal, reproducible test.

I have reported it to the sed maintainers and they are working on it.

Great. Do we know yet which versions are affected?

A message or comment in the code that seds not properly handling utf8
characters have been shown to be the cause of the problem and that git
selects sed from the PATH would have been 100% effective in at least
one case.  I don't know the troubleshooting skills of the other two
people that bumped into the problem so can't comment.  Of the billions
of people that have not (if it existed) looked at the breadcrumb and
weren't led astray it's (would have) also been 100% effective.  Can
you in turn posit any reasonable way that get_author_ident_from_commit
would improperly build author-script short of a bad sed?  I guess you
could pull out transient or systematic disk error.

I assume from bogus commit objects. But I admit I am just guessing, and
don't have data.

You do, in fact, have several solutions.  I won't reiterate since they
are in the thread earlier.  You also have in many cases the valid
concern that the solutions would not be backwards compatible.  And
yes, this sed will get fixed but what then?  The next person that gets
a sed they don't expect earlier in their PATH will have to go through
the same steps.

When I said:

quoted

But really, I'd rather just see the broken sed fixed. Where would the
breadcrumb lead people at this point, anyway? We don't actually have a
solution besides "uninstall this other, crappy sed". Has the sed bug
actually been fixed?

I meant that there is not a fix for the _user_ to perform at that point.
The point of a breadcrumb like that is that we are not going to put a
fix into git, so we want to at least give the user a clue that their
system has a problem. But what is their next step after being informed
that their system has a problem?

-Peff