Re: [PATCH] import-tars: ignore the global PAX header

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

throws too much.  That would welcome their effort to enhance the
importer, if they find it more useful to keep some other information
found in global headers, without breaking the intent of this change.

I don't think that we're throwing away anything because the PAX header is
intended to be a _header_, not a _file_, yet
`contrib/fast-import/import-tars.perl` currently treats PAX headers that
way.

What I meant (and wrote) was information contained within the
header.  You could store such metadata (e.g. this tree came from
this commit from the upstream project) in the commit object while
importing, for example.

As I wrote, I do not think we need to implement such feature right
now.  I am just saying that we should make sure we are not
unintendely discouraging future developers from doing so by giving
an impression that we are claiming "a pax header is intended to be a
header and has no interesting information---never look at it".  If
we said "We discard the headers because it is the most expedient way
and we currently have no use for them", that would make it clear
that it is OK for them (the future ourselves developers) to extend
the code not to lose the information, as long as they keep ignoring
the prefix thing alone, if they want to follow the course set by
this change.

quoted

Having said all that, even before "git archive" existed, release
tarballs by many projects had leading prefix so that a tarball
extract would be made inside a versioned directory.  To truly help
users of the importer, doesn't the logic to allow the user to say
"please strip one leading level of directory from all the tarballs I
feed you, as I know they are versioned directories" belong to the
command line option of the importer?

I guess nobody needed an explicit way to strip path prefixes yet, since
the implicit way works so well.

Now you confused me.  If implicit way already works well, why are we
adding this patch to make it implicitly ignore?