Subject: Re: git archive should use vendor extension in pax header

From: René Scharfe <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2016 23:06:25 +0100

Am 24.01.2016 um 16:59 schrieb [email-masked]:
> Right now, git archive creates a pax global header of the form
>
>      comment=57ca140635bf157354124e4e4b3c8e1bde2832f1
>
> in tar archives it creates. This is suboptimal as as comments are
> specified to be ignored by extraction software. It is impossible to
> find out in an automatic way (short of guessing) that this is supposed
> to be a commit hash.

This is only a problem if you don't know how a given tar files was 
created (or modified later).  How did you get into this situation?  Or 
in other words: Please tell me more about your use case.

> It would be much more useful if git created a
> custom key. As per POSIX suggestions, something like this would be
> appropriate:
>
>      GIT.commit=57ca140635bf157354124e4e4b3c8e1bde2832f1

This would be included in addition to the comment in order to avoid 
breaking existing users, I guess.

If you have a random archive and want to know if it was generated by git 
then your next question might be which options and substitutions were 
used.  That reminds me of this thread regarding verifiable archives:

     http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/240244

Thanks,
René