On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 07:57:20PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 02:28:25PM -0500, Justin Tobler wrote:

quoted

To make machine parsing easier, this series introduces a NUL-delimited
output mode for git-rev-list(1) via a `-z` option following a suggestion
from Junio in a previous thread[1]. In this mode, instead of LF, each
object is delimited with two NUL bytes and any object metadata is
separated with a single NUL byte. Examples:

        <oid> NUL NUL
        <oid> [NUL <path>] NUL NUL
        ?<oid> [NUL <token>=<value>]... NUL NUL

In this mode, path and value info are printed as-is without any special
encoding or truncation.

I think this is a good direction, but I have two compatibility
questions:

  1. What should "git rev-list -z --stdin" do? In most other programs
     with a "-z" option it affects both input and output. I don't
     particularly care about this case myself, but it will be hard to
     change later. So we probably want to decide now.

I would lean into the direction of making "-z" change the format both
for stdin and stdout. That's what we do in most cases, and in those
cases where we didn't we came to regret it (git-cat-file(1)).

Patrick