Re: [PATCH V4] config: add --expiry-date

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 12:18:49PM +0100, Heiko Voigt wrote:

> > Fine by me. While I think the original intent was to be more lenient to
> > malformed .gitmodules, it's not like we're seeing bug reports about it.
> 
> My original intent was not about being more lenient about malformed
> .gitmodules but having a way to deal with repository history that might
> have a malformed .gitmodules in its history. Since depending on the
> branch it is on it might be quite carved in stone.
> On an active project it would not be that easy to rewrite history to get
> out of that situation.
> 
> When a .gitmodules file in the worktree is malformed it is easy to fix.
> That is not the case when we are reading configurations from blobs.
> 
> My guess why there are no reports is that maybe not too many users are
> using this infrastructure yet, plus it is probably seldom that someone
> edits the .gitmodules file by hand which could lead to such a situation.
> But if such an error occurs it will be very annoying if we die while
> parsing submodule configurations. The only solution I see currently is
> to turn submodule recursion off completely.
> 
> But maybe I am being overly cautious here.

Ah, OK, that makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks for explaining.

I agree that is a good goal to shoot for in the long term. It's not the
end of the world if there are a few code paths that may die() for now,
but we should try not to add more, and eventually weed out the ones that
do.

-Peff