Subject: Re: [PATCH 5/9] git-cat-file: Add --separator option

From: [email-masked] (Brian Downing)
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:43:01 -0500

On Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 10:46:33PM -0700, Adam Roben wrote:
> +--separator::
> +	A string to print in between the output for each object passed on
> +	stdin. A newline will be appended to the separator each time it is
> +	printed.

Maybe I'm just unreasonably paranoid, but I don't think I could ever
trust that you'd never find an arbitrary separator in the data.  I
suppose if you scanned the files beforehand you could come up with
something guaranteed to be unique, but that seems like a pain (and
doesn't happen regardless in patch 9/9; it just uses
"--------------GITCATFILESEPARATOR-----------")  If I were committing to
SVN, it's sure not something I'd like to bet the integrity of my data
on.

I think a far more reasonable output format for multiple objects would
be something like:

<count> LF
<raw data> LF

Where <count> is the number of bytes in the <raw data> as an ASCII
decimal integer.

This is pretty much the spiritual analog to the fast-import "exact byte
count" data input format as well.

-bcd