Subject: Re: [PATCH v10 11/12] Documentation: add documentation for 'git interpret-trailers'

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 12:18:20 -0700

Christian Couder <[email-masked]> writes:

> From: Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]>
> ...
> An option like --input-separator might be enough to support this.
>
>> For me this means:
>> 
>> * Enumerating a list of allowed separators (e.g., [:=#])
>
> Junio suggested in a message that users might use different separators
> like '%'.

I actually think we shouldn't go any fancier than ":" and nothing
else, not even "#".

I was hoping that you would eventually realize that there are only
two viable extremes when I suggested "the users may want to use
other random characters like '%'" and also "the users can specify
the 'key' with colon and trailing SP" (in $gmane/245960).

 - If you want to give the projects greater control of the format,
   then you cannot rely on "separators" anyway.  Your users can list
   all possible footer "keys" the particular project would use, so
   that they are recognized by Git, be that "Fixes: 4a28f16", "Bug
   #12354", without hard-coding what "separator" Git must pay
   attention to.  You can easily find a run of lines that begin with
   any of the "key" (e.g. "Fixes: ", "Signed-off-by: ", "Bug #",
   ...) starting from the tail-end of the log message and that is
   your footer block.  No need for "separators" at all.

 - If you want to give the projects freedom to come up with random
   new kinds of footers without pre-arrangement, then you need to
   have a reliable way to say if any line you have never seen could
   be a footer material.  A colon has been used everywhere, and used
   even in the "Fixes: 4a28f16" example you took from the kernel
   circle.  I think you presented it with '#' but I do not think
   they even want that, looking at:

   http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2014-May/000618.html

I also think that bug tracking system using "Bug #12345" is an
unrelated issue, as log viewers would want to highlight and make
links out of them anywhere in the log message text, not limited
to the log footer part.

As to which one of these two we should take, I tend to think that we
should start small and limited; loosening the syntax later is much
easier than going the other way, i.e. ":" and nothing else.