Subject: Re: [PATCH] Geolocation support

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2015 11:13:42 -0800

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 2:24 AM, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> In case I was not clear, I do not think it is likely for us to accept
>> a patch that mucks with object header fields with this information.
>> Have them in the log text and let UI interpret them.
>
> We've already told clients for a long time to ignore fields they don't
> know about, 

Yes, but the reason that mechanism is there is not because we want
to add random cruft Git does not have to know about.  It is to avoid
older Git from suddenly stop working when we really need to add new
essential things.

This was discussed in great length on this list already.

cf. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/138848/focus=138852

More importantly, adding non-essential stuff left and right will
force third party Git reimplementations to pay attention to them and
also will leave room for them to make mistakes when deciding what to
propagate, what to drop and what to update when rewriting commits
via rebase, cherry-pick, etc.

> why would we not store what's intended to be
> machine-readable key-value pair data in the commit object itself,

I think this sentence gets it backwards.  The question to ask is if
it is an arbitrary cruft that the end users are better off if they
can easily typofix in the commit message log editor, or is it
essential for Git to operate correctly and end users shouldn't be
allowed to muck with in the editor?

>> The expected location format is "CITY, COUNTRY (LAT, LON)".

I would expect that I can typofix "Les Angeles" to "Los Angeles",
if I were using this feature.