On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 08:21:45AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Lucas Seiki Oshiro <lucasseikioshiro@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >
> >> Currently, `git rev-parse` covers a wide range of functionality not
> >> directly related to parsing revisions, as its name suggests. Over time,
> >> many features like parsing datestrings, options, paths, and others
> >> were added to it because there wasn't a more appropriate command
> >> to place them.
> >>
> >> Create a new Git command called `repo`. `git repo` will be the main
> >> command for obtaining the information about a repository (such as
> >> metadata and metrics), returning them in a machine readable format
> >> following the syntax "field<LF>value<NUL>".
> >>
> >
> > Doesn't the latter sentence only apply to 'git repo info'? Other
> > sub-commands may not follow the field<LF>value<NUL> syntax, no?
>
> True.
>
> I also wonder who it helps to use <LF> as a field separator. Once
> we require consumers to properly handle <NUL>, it does not make it
> easier to write such a consumer script if the format uses <LF>
> there, does it? Besides, wouldn't it possible that field may have
> to contain any end-user specified key, including <LF>? If so, we'd
> need to have some quoting/unquoting mechanism in the syntax anyway,
> so the behefit of using <NUL> to simplify the parser would already
> be lost.
Scripts should always use NUL, true. But sometimes a user may want to
inspect these key-value pairs, as well, just to double check a certain
property of the repository, or to figure out how a certain property
looks like while writing a script that parses the same key-value but
NUL-separated pairs. Using NUL bytes would be a bit of a pain in that
situation.
I'm not really too sure whether we need to bother with quoting. The
LF-separated output shouldn't ever be used in a script, so I don't mind
too much whether it always works. But I guess it wouldn't be hard either
to just have something like:
if (uses_newline)
quote_c_style(...);
So with that in mind it's probably better to just do the right thing.
Patrick
