RE: git archive setting user and group

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2021 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: git archive setting user and group

On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 10:00:04PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote:

quoted

Adding support for using a custom user and group should be easy.  Is
this just a cosmetic thing?  Regular users would ignore the user info in
the archive, and root should not be used for extracting, and on systems
that don't have a logwatch user this wouldn't make a difference anyway,
right?

Right now, "git archive" operations are bit-for-bit identical across all
versions going back at least 8+ years. In fact, we've been relying on this to
support bundling tarball signatures with git tags themselves (via git notes).
E.g. you can see this in action here:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tag/?h=v5.10.9

If you click on "(sig)", you will download a signature that can be used to
verify the tarball generated using "git archive".

I would argue that adding user/group support to "git archive" operation is
not really solving any problems other than "it's different from when I run it
as a regular user" -- and can introduce potential compatibility problems if

Being pedantic here, it is different than when I run it as any user - including root.

Don’t confuse tar x with tar c.

tar c captures the current owner of the files, or allows override with a single user / map file.

implemented.

So, I would selfishly vote not to implement this.

-K