Re: [PATCH v2] commit, status: #comment diff output in verbose mode

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 11, 2011, 05:31 UTC
Message-ID: <20110311053107.GB16605@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20110311012318.GB15377@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 08:23:18PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> I like the proposal for:
> 
>   # Lines below this one will be removed.
>   diff --git ...
> 
> which seems to have the best of both worlds, robust and easy for editors
> to recognize as a diff. For that matter, we could also do "# Lines below
> this one..." for _all_ of the git-status template, but I don't think
> it's necessary. Those lines are already clearly marked with a delimiter,
> and I don't think anybody is complaining about them (and the "Lines
> below this one..." line adds just one more line of cruft).

Hmm, actually the proposal that Gábor mentioned here:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/100525/focus=100655

was to mark the whole status template as "everything below this line is uninteresting". And I was wrong that it would add one more line of cruft; we already have a line saying "lines with '#' will be ignored", so it would be replacing it.

I do still think I prefer the "#" as comment lines, though. Editors understand that concept pretty well. For example, one thing that happens to me a lot is that I write a paragraph, then edit it, then ask the editor to re-wrap it. Inevitably it buts against the "#" lines, and those get re-wrapped, too. I could fix it, of course, but I don't bother because the editor knows that the stuff on "#" lines should remain on "#" lines. So as it is now, the git-status output gets scrambled, but I don't have to care. With a special "# Lines below this one..." line, I will have mangled it and get extra cruft in my commit message.

But I admit that this is one pretty bizarre personal anecdote and might not affect anyone else.

-Peff