diff mbox series

[v8,4/9] packed-backend: check if header starts with "# pack-refs with: "

Message ID Z8CNkGJjKl0eTolM@ArchLinux (mailing list archive)
State New
Headers show
Series add more ref consistency checks | expand

Commit Message

shejialuo Feb. 27, 2025, 4:06 p.m. UTC 
We always write a space after "# pack-refs with:" but we don't align
with this rule in the "create_snapshot" method where we would check
whether header starts with "# pack-refs with:". It might seem that we
should undoubtedly tighten this rule, however, we don't have any
technical documentation about this and there is a possibility that we
would break the compatibility for other third-party libraries.

By investigating influential third-party libraries, we could conclude
how these libraries handle the header of "packed-refs" file:

1. libgit2 is fine and always writes the space. It also expects the
   whitespace to exist.
2. JGit does not expect th header to have a trailing space, but expects
   the "peeled" capability to have a leading space, which is mostly
   equivalent because that capability is typically the first one we
   write. It always writes the space.
3. gitoxide expects the space t exist and writes it.
4. go-git doesn't create the header by default.

As many third-party libraries expect a single space after "# pack-refs
with:", if we forget to write the space after the colon,
"create_snapshot" won't catch this. And we would break other
re-implementations. So, we'd better tighten the rule by checking whether
the header starts with "# pack-refs with: ".

Mentored-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Mentored-by: Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: shejialuo <shejialuo@gmail.com>
---
 refs/packed-backend.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/refs/packed-backend.c b/refs/packed-backend.c
index 1fba804a2a..eaa8746f3e 100644
--- a/refs/packed-backend.c
+++ b/refs/packed-backend.c
@@ -694,7 +694,7 @@  static struct snapshot *create_snapshot(struct packed_ref_store *refs)
 
 		tmp = xmemdupz(snapshot->buf, eol - snapshot->buf);
 
-		if (!skip_prefix(tmp, "# pack-refs with:", (const char **)&p))
+		if (!skip_prefix(tmp, "# pack-refs with: ", (const char **)&p))
 			die_invalid_line(refs->path,
 					 snapshot->buf,
 					 snapshot->eof - snapshot->buf);