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docs/fast-export: explain --anonymize more completely

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The original commit made mention of this option, but not why
one might want it or how they might use it. Let's try to be
a little more thorough, and also explain how to confirm that
the output really is anonymous.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jeff King 2014-08-28 08:32:58 -04:00 committed by Junio C Hamano
parent a872275098
commit 75d3d6573e
1 changed files with 59 additions and 4 deletions
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63
Documentation/git-fast-export.txt
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@ -106,10 +106,9 @@ marks the same across runs.
different from the commit's first parent).
--anonymize::
Replace all refnames, paths, blob contents, commit and tag
messages, names, and email addresses in the output with
anonymized data, while still retaining the shape of history and
of the stored tree.
Anonymize the contents of the repository while still retaining
the shape of the history and stored tree. See the section on
`ANONYMIZING` below.
--refspec::
Apply the specified refspec to each ref exported. Multiple of them can
@ -147,6 +146,62 @@ referenced by that revision range contains the string
'refs/heads/master'.
ANONYMIZING
-----------
If the `--anonymize` option is given, git will attempt to remove all
identifying information from the repository while still retaining enough
of the original tree and history patterns to reproduce some bugs. The
goal is that a git bug which is found on a private repository will
persist in the anonymized repository, and the latter can be shared with
git developers to help solve the bug.
With this option, git will replace all refnames, paths, blob contents,
commit and tag messages, names, and email addresses in the output with
anonymized data. Two instances of the same string will be replaced
equivalently (e.g., two commits with the same author will have the same
anonymized author in the output, but bear no resemblance to the original
author string). The relationship between commits, branches, and tags is
retained, as well as the commit timestamps (but the commit messages and
refnames bear no resemblance to the originals). The relative makeup of
the tree is retained (e.g., if you have a root tree with 10 files and 3
trees, so will the output), but their names and the contents of the
files will be replaced.
If you think you have found a git bug, you can start by exporting an
anonymized stream of the whole repository:
---------------------------------------------------
$ git fast-export --anonymize --all >anon-stream
---------------------------------------------------
Then confirm that the bug persists in a repository created from that
stream (many bugs will not, as they really do depend on the exact
repository contents):
---------------------------------------------------
$ git init anon-repo
$ cd anon-repo
$ git fast-import <../anon-stream
$ ... test your bug ...
---------------------------------------------------
If the anonymized repository shows the bug, it may be worth sharing
`anon-stream` along with a regular bug report. Note that the anonymized
stream compresses very well, so gzipping it is encouraged. If you want
to examine the stream to see that it does not contain any private data,
you can peruse it directly before sending. You may also want to try:
---------------------------------------------------
$ perl -pe 's/\d+/X/g' <anon-stream | sort -u | less
---------------------------------------------------
which shows all of the unique lines (with numbers converted to "X", to
collapse "User 0", "User 1", etc into "User X"). This produces a much
smaller output, and it is usually easy to quickly confirm that there is
no private data in the stream.
Limitations
-----------