Subject: Re: [PATCH] Force new line at end of commit message

From: "Shawn O. Pearce" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:42:02 -0500

Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Dec 2007, Bernt Hansen wrote:
> 
> > git rebase --interactive formats the combined commit log message 
> > incorrectly when squashing 3 or more commits which have no newline on 
> > the last line of the commit message.
> 
> This is a patch for git-gui, so why not make that clear in the subject?  
> (And I have a hunch that Shawn would have liked the patch relative to 
> git-gui.git, not git.git...)

Indeed.

Most git-gui changes have a subject that starts with "git-gui:" so
its clear in both the email and in the commit log that the change is
a git-gui change.  Remember, git-gui's logs show up in the core Git
logs (as its merged with -s subtree) so having that git-gui: prefix
does help people to localize the change within the overall suite.

git-am -3 does a reasonable job at correcting patches that are like
this one is (that aren't relative to git-gui.git) so that's less
of an issue for me.  And what git-am -3 cannot correct git-apply
-p2 usually does.  If that can't fix the patch then I'll usually
throw it back as its then most likely a true conflict.
 
> Further, there are other tools than rebase -i that like commit messages 
> better when terminated by a newline, and _that_ is what I would like to 
> read in the commit message for this patch.

Hmmph.  For that reason alone I'm tempted to *not* apply Bernt's
patch.

There is nothing that requires that a commit object end with an LF.
So tools that make this assumption (that there is a trailing LF)
while processing the body of a commit message are quite simply
broken.

Its easy in fast-import to generate commits without a trailing LF.
Or in many text editors its possible to save a file with no trailing
LF on the last line.  My favorite VI clone does that; if the file
doesn't end with an LF when it opens its *damned* hard to get a
trailing LF onto that last line.  And yes, that's the editor I use
for commit messages when I'm not using git-gui.

IMHO git-gui is producing valid commit messages, and always does
so with no trailing LF, and any tool that is assuming a trailing
LF is always present is broken.

Keeping git-gui behavior like this actually highlights the other
tools that are broken (here Bernt found git-rebase--interactive).

I'd like to hear Junio's or Linus' two cents on the matter, but
if we really want to say that all commits must end with an LF then
maybe git-commit-tree, git-hash-object and git-fast-import should be
performing that sort of validation before creating such an object in
the ODB.  Which is probably a change that shouldn't be made before
1.6.0 as its somewhat likely to break people's existing scripts.

-- 
Shawn.