Re: RFD: fast-import is picky with author names (and maybe it should - but how much so?)

On 11/11/2012 07:41 AM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 8:25 PM, A Large Angry SCM[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

On 11/10/2012 01:43 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

quoted

So, the options are:

a) Leave the name conversion to the export tools, and when they miss
some weird corner case, like 'Author<email', let the user face the
consequences, perhaps after an hour of the process.

We know there are sources of data that don't have git-formatted author
names, so we know every tool out there must do this checking.

In addition to that, let the export tool decide what to do when one of
these bad names appear, which in many cases probably means do nothing,
so the user would not even see that such a bad name was there, which
might not be what they want.

b) Do the name conversion in fast-import itself, perhaps optionally,
so if a tool missed some weird corner case, the user does not have to
face the consequences.

The tool writers don't have to worry about this, so we would not have
tools out there doing a half-assed job of this.

And what happens when such bad names end up being consistent: warning,
a scaffold mapping of bad names, etc.


One is bad for the users, and the tools writers, only disadvantages,
the other is good for the users and the tools writers, only
advantages.

c) Do the name conversion, and whatever other cleanup and manipulations
you're interesting in, in a filter between the exporter and git-fast-import.

Such a filter would probably be quite complicated, and would decrease
performance.

Really?

The fast import stream protocol is pretty simple. All the filter really 
needs to do is pass through everything that isn't a 'commit' command. 
And for the 'commit' command, it only needs to do something with the 
'author' and 'committer' lines; passing through everything else.

I agree that an additional filter _may_ decrease performance somewhat if 
you are already CPU constrained. But I suspect that the effect would be 
negligible compared to the all of the SHA-1 calculations.