Backward compatibility 0.2.1 - 0.2.6

[rjcoelho]

Hi,

This is what i get when trying reveal files using 0.2.1 that were hidden using 0.2.6
config/overlays/local/keys.config:d2f1286fad60a1c84dbe0388637f7733c9454d52bcbea8afd46ad2401a5849d2.secret: No such file or directory

Basically mappings how has sha1, which 0.2.1 doesn't understand. This should be an opt-in on 0.2.6 and later.

[joshrabinowitz]

Hello, @rjcoelho , and thank for filing this issue.

I believe the change you mention, regarding hashes in the mapping.cfg file, happened some time ago, in Sept of 2017, before the 0.2.3 release.

I did a little research on semver and persistent file backward compatibility and this is what I came up with:

In semver/semver#275 it is said:

"semver doesn't talk about (sic) forward compatibility at all: 
it does not promise that downgrading from (for example) 
1.2.3 to 1.2.1 will be possible."

However, we should document that if you use the -m option to git-secret hide that your mappings file will not be backward compatible with versions of git-secret before 0.2.3.

If hashes are getting stored in .gitsecret/paths/mapping.cfg when the user has never used git secret hide -m, then that's a new bug and please let us know. (Edit: removed, this was incorrect)

I'll plan to close this issue when the docs are updated to mention that mapping.cfg may not be backward compatible if you use git secret hide -m. Thanks again and let us know if you have any additional input!

[rjcoelho]

@joshrabinowitz thanks for the clarification.

I don't use -m option. What I do is git secret hide with 0.2.6 and try to git secret reveal with 0.2.1

[joshrabinowitz]

@rjcoelho , I read the code too quickly. You are correct, after encryption, a hash is always written to the mapping.cfg file in recent versions of git-secret.

As mentioned above, by my reading of 'semver', it's not /technically/ a bug that persistent files from new versions of git-secret are not backward compatible with older versions of git-secret (though it is certainly inconvenient).

Can you upgrade git-secret from 0.2.1 in your appropriate environment?

We could add some sort of flag to stop writing checksums to the mappings.cfg file, but I'm hesitant to add a flag just relating to the checksum in mapping.cfg.

[joshrabinowitz]

I've add a PR altering CHANGELOG.md to note the backward incompatibility. (See #537)

Since this is the first time this has come up (and since the change was made some two years ago) I'm not planning on adding any more docs or code changes related to this topic for now. If you're ok with this resolution, feel free to close this issue, @rjcoelho (assuming github will let you); alternately let us know below! Thanks again.