karthik nayak [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Is there any other way to make cat-file looser other than accepting
an unknown type name from the future?  If not, then perhaps it may
make sense to give it a generic name that implies that we would
trigger such additional looseness in the future.  But as the
inventor of it as a debugging aid, I would say a name that spells
out the specific way this option is being loose, e.g.

quoted

     --allow-bogus-type

or with s/bogus/unknown/, best describes what it currently does.

Yes this gives the best description, but its large, while we could use something
like --no-strict instead.

We could, if you answered my first question with "no".

By naming this "--no-strict", the first bug report you will receive
may be that "cat-file --no-strict" should parse a zlib deflate that
begins with "blob 1234\n\0" (notice that there are two SPs instead
of the usual one, and length is followed by LF that should not be
there before the NUL) but it does not.

As your option name "--no-strict" signals that you will make the
best effort to parse such nonsense, that would be a valid bug
report, against which you would need to update the code to make it
work.  But is it worth the effort to make such a thing work?  I
dunno.