Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] notes: don't indent empty lines

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 12:39:31 +0200

On Sat, Sep 11 2021, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 9:59 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> >> Eric Sunshine <[email-masked]> writes:
>> >> > Have we made a decision about whether this patch series -- which
>> >> > avoids indenting blank notes lines -- is desirable? Or are we worried
>> >> > about backward-compatibility?
>>
>> This change per-se seems nice, but even having reviewed it to the point
>> of rewriting parts of it, I didn't really look into what the whole
>> workflow you were trying to address is.
>>
>> So e.g. just to pick a random commit of your for show:
>>     $ git show c990a4c11dd | sed 's/$/Z/'
>> Here we end up also adding the whitespace indenting to the empty lines,
>> whereas if we were trying to feed this to an editor we'd place those
>> later Z's at the start of our line.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "feed this to an editor". Do you mean
> sending the output of `git show` to an editor? I'm guessing that's not
> what you mean, and that you instead are talking about editing the
> commit message in an editor (say, via the "reword" option of `git
> rebase --interactive`).

Feed it to whatever, maybe I have a commit message in my terminal I
highlight and copy/paste, my shell/terminal is highlighting line-endings
etc.

I've got a default bias towards trimming this whitespace, I'm just
wondering why notes are a special-case as opposed to our more general
log/notes etc. output.

>> Are notes different? Or are they just similarly indented? For commits we
>> don't insert that leading whitespace in the commit object, do notes get
>> that part wrong too?
>
> Notes don't store the indented blank lines; it's only at output time,
> such as with `git format-patch --notes` that the blank lines get
> indented along with the rest of the note text (just as is happening in
> your `git show` example in which the entire commit message is being
> indented, including the blank lines).

Ah, so with your change we'd end up with trimmed notes, but not the
trimmed main body of the commit message?

We don't have to fix everything at once, just establishing context,
maybe it's useful for format-patch etc. in isolation...

>> It might be showing, but I've only used notes a few times, my main use
>> of them is Junio's amlog.
>
> I also have only used notes a few times.
>
>> So even for someone experienced in git, I think some show & tell of
>> step-by-step showing in the commit message how we end up with X before,
>> and have Y with this change would help a lot.
>
> This all came about due to two unrelated circumstances: (1) a few
> months ago, I configured Emacs to highlight trailing whitespace, and
> (2) I decided to use `notes` to add commentary to a commit since,
> although I normally just write the commentary directly in the patch
> itself after running `git format-patch`, in this case, it likely will
> be weeks or months before I finish the series, and was worried that
> I'd forget the intended commentary by that time, thus recorded it as a
> note. Since I've almost never used notes, I ran `git format-patch
> --notes` as a test and was surprised to see the trailing whitespace on
> the "blank" lines when viewing the patch in the editor.
>
> This submission started as a single patch which just "fixed" the bug
> and added a test. Only after that was complete (but before I submitted
> the patch), did I discover that other tests in the suite were failing
> since the "fix" also changed git-log's default output format which
> includes notes (indented). Since I so rarely use notes, I had either
> forgotten that git-log showed notes or didn't know in the first place.
> The submission grew to multiple patches due to fixing those
> newly-failing tests.
>
> Anyhow, since then, I've discovered that `git format-patch
> --range-diff` also indents blank lines. And you've now shown that `git
> show` does, as well, so the behavior which triggered this "fix" turns
> out to be somewhat normal in this project, rather than a one-off "bug"
> in need of a fix.

Per the above I wouldn't mind this just being changed for all of them,
even one at a time.