On 2023-01-31 at 15:05:55, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 09:54:58AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> > I'm one of the GitHub employees who chimed in there, and I'm also a Git
> > contributor in my own time (and I am speaking here only in my personal
> > capacity, since this is a personal address).  I made a change some years
> > back to the archive format to fix the permissions on pax headers when
> > extracted as files, and kernel.org was relying on that and broke.  Linus
> > yelled at me because of that.
> > 
> > Since then, I've been very opposed to us guaranteeing output format
> > consistency without explicitly doing so.  I had sent some patches before
> > that I don't think ever got picked up that documented this explicitly.
> > I very much don't want people to come to rely on our behaviour unless we
> > explicitly guarantee it.
> 
> I understand your position, but I also think it's one of those things that
> happen despite your best efforts to prevent it. :)
> 
> May I suggest adding a "git-archive --stable" that offers this guarantee,
> simply as a matter of codifying the fact that the world has built
> infrastructure around git's repeatable output. Maybe just for .tar (and
> .tar.gz).

It is my intention to implement just .tar.  That's my proposal: simply a
pax-based format that serializes in a consistent way according to a
predefined spec.

As far as whether other people want to implement consistent compression,
they are welcome to also write a spec and implement it.  I personally
feel that's too hard to get right and am not planning on working on it.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA