Re: [BUG] You can't have single quote in your username

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2019 at 01:17:48PM +0000, Giuseppe Crinò wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 03:14:55PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> > We'd still want to keep the low-level removal of "<>\n", since those are
> > syntactically significant to Git (i.e., if they sneak in you end up with
> > a broken commit object).
> 
> Would it work to change `strbuf_addstr_without_crud()` such that instead of
> removing crud from the beginning and *then* crud from the end, it removes crud
> as long as it's palindromic? Then the function proceeds to remove "<>\n" from
> the string as before.
> 
> That would implement the following _mappings_:
> 
> 'Foo bar' => Foo bar
> Micheal Jr. => Micheal Jr.
> Mr. McDonalds => Mr. McDonalds
> "John Baz" => John Baz
> "JJ\x0a" => JJ
> 
> What do you think?

I think we don't have enough data to really know how much it will help
or hurt. :)

On the plus side, it is less risky than dropping the end-point crud removal
entirely.

But it still risks losing a case where some code path relies on the crud
cleanup for odd cases (mismatched delimiters, or interleaved delimiters,
or non-delimiter crud mixed in with delimiters).

On the one hand, I am actually OK with dropping the crud removal
entirely and seeing what happens, and this is a lesser form of that. On
the other hand, it puts us in a funny in-between situation where tools
can _usually_ get away without cleaning up the names, but occasionally
get bit. It might be easier to just say that we don't do cleanup.

So I dunno. There is no patch to be discussed, and I am not volunteering
to write one.  So I think whoever chooses to do so has a lot of control
over what is proposed. :)

-Peff