Subject: Re: A shortcoming of the git repo format

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:40:36 -0700

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> No, that's definitely _not_ the point.
> 
> I repeat: git does not do any free-form parsin AT ALL. The links are in 
> well-defined places, and you do not ever search for them. And that's 
> really very very important.
> 

I know that.  However, is that going to be true for all versions of the 
repository format over all time?  If so, the repository format is brittle.

 > > Currently there is no  such delimiter for that.
 >
 > There absolutely is.
 >
 > For a "commit", the format is...

My point was that with a syntactic delimiter, one can write a tool that 
doesn't necessarily know everything about every tag, including future 
tags which may not have been invented when the tool was written.

One can simply say "we don't do that"; finding an unknown tag is always 
a fatal error.  That means the format is more brittle, but brittle does 
mean it breaks as opposed to getting deformed in some, potentially 
undesirable way.

	-hpa