Subject: Re: [PATCH 9/9] trailer: add tests for "git interpret-trailers"

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 12:46:33 -0800

Josh Triplett <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 09:19:55AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Christian Couder <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 
>> > +# Do not remove trailing spaces below!
>> > +cat >complex_message_trailers <<'EOF'
>> > +Fixes: 
>> > +Acked-by: 
>> > +Reviewed-by: 
>> > +Signed-off-by: 
>> > +EOF
>> 
>> Just a hint.  I think it is far safer and robust over time to do
>> something like this:
>> 
>> 	sed -e 's/ Z$/ /' <<-\EOF
>>         Fixes: Z
>>         Acked-by: Z
>>         EOF
>> 
>> instead of a comment, which can warn human developers but does not
>> do anything to prevent their editors' auto-fix features from kicking
>> in.
>
> This, but for simplicity, since every line needs the trailing space, why
> not just use 's/$/ /' and drop the ' Z' on every line?
>
> </bikeshed>
>
> - Josh Triplett

A few reasons:

 - The "everybody will have a single SP at the end" may or may not
   last forever;

 - With your scheme, if you already had _one_ trailing SPs in the
   input, it would be hard to spot in the source;

 - It makes it visually very clear that we expect a SP after these
   colons.  This is especially true if you replace 'Z' with
   something more readable (e.g. '|').