Added -z option to git-annex commands that use --batch, useful for
supporting filenames containing newlines.
It only controls input to --batch, the output will still be line delimited
unless --json or etc is used to get some other output. While git often
makes -z affect both input and output, I don't like trying them together,
and making it affect output would have been a significant complication,
and also git-annex output is generally not intended to be machine parsed,
unless using --json or a format option.
Commands that take pairs like "file key" still separate them with a space
in --batch mode. All such commands take care to support filenames with
spaces when parsing that, so there was no need to change it, and it would
have needed significant changes to the batch machinery to separate tose
with a null.
To make fromkey and registerurl support -z, I had to give them a --batch
option. The implicit batch mode they enter when not provided with input
parameters does not support -z as that would have complicated option
parsing. Seemed better to move these toward using the same --batch as
everything else, though the implicit batch mode can still be used.
This commit was sponsored by Ole-Morten Duesund on Patreon.
Work around git cat-file --batch's protocol not supporting newlines by
running git cat-file not batched and passing the filename as a
parameter.
Of course this is quite a lot less efficient, especially because it
currently runs it multiple times to query for different pieces of
information.
Also, it has subtly different behavior when the batch process was
started and then some changes were made, in which case the batch process
sees the old index but this workaround sees the current index. Since
that batch behavior is mostly a problem that affects the assistant and has
to be worked around in it, I think I can get away with this difference.
I don't know of any other problems with newlines in filenames, everything
else in git I can think of supports -z. And git-annex's json output
supports newlines in filenames so downstream parsers from git-annex will be ok.
git-annex commands that use --batch themselves don't support newlines
in input filenames; using --json --batch is currently a way around that
problem.
This commit was sponsored by Ewen McNeill on Patreon.
