Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] mingw: only test index entries for backslashes, not tree entries

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2020 17:57:49 -0800

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> As mentioned above, the idea is to prevent Git from attempting to create
> files with illegal file name characters.
[...]
> On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> Is there anything we can or should do to prevent people checking in
>> new examples of paths with backslash in them (on all platforms)?
>
> As mentioned in my reply to Junio, I don't think that it would be wise to
> even try to warn about backslashes in the file names. There are _so_ many
> Git users out there, I am convinced that at least some of them have valid
> use cases for file names with backslashes in them.

Thanks for the quick answers.  It helps.

I think allowing people to clone
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/civetweb but not to check out
the problematic historic revision is a reasonable choice, especially
since it's still possible to get the data from there using

	git checkout <rev> -- . ':!bad-paths'

[...]
> Or maybe you know of a code path in the `unpack_trees()` machinery that
> does _not_ go through `add_index_entry()`? I would be very interested to
> learn about such code paths.

Every once in a while someone (e.g., in #git) has wanted "git checkout
--skip-index <rev> -- <paths>", and that would be the natural way to
implement such a thing.  But no one has done it yet. :)

We'll just have to keep a watchful eye as people make new
contributions.

Sincerely,
Jonathan