Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 2/4] cat-file: teach cat-file a '--literally' option

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2015 10:04:59 -0700

karthik nayak <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Is there any other way to make cat-file looser other than accepting
>> an unknown type name from the future?  If not, then perhaps it may
>> make sense to give it a generic name that implies that we would
>> trigger such additional looseness in the future.  But as the
>> inventor of it as a debugging aid, I would say a name that spells
>> out the specific way this option is being loose, e.g.
>>
>> >      --allow-bogus-type
>>
>> or with s/bogus/unknown/, best describes what it currently does.
>
> Yes this gives the best description, but its large, while we could use something
> like --no-strict instead.

We could, if you answered my first question with "no".

By naming this "--no-strict", the first bug report you will receive
may be that "cat-file --no-strict" should parse a zlib deflate that
begins with "blob 1234\n\0" (notice that there are two SPs instead
of the usual one, and length is followed by LF that should not be
there before the NUL) but it does not.

As your option name "--no-strict" signals that you will make the
best effort to parse such nonsense, that would be a valid bug
report, against which you would need to update the code to make it
work.  But is it worth the effort to make such a thing work?  I
dunno.