Re: Comment trailers vs. bracketed lines

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 8, 2025, 20:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20250508202437.GF18229@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <29ff888d-9749-4fbe-9722-95dd71008a2a@app.fastmail.com>

On Wed, May 07, 2025 at 06:41:27PM +0200, Kristoffer Haugsbakk wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> > But thinking about the signoff requirement: you already have all the
> > information you need from the next trailer, namely the signoff.  In
> > other words this:
> >
> >     [kh: Added tests]
> >     Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
> >
> > Has the same information as this:
> >
> >     Comment: Added tests
> >     Signed-off-by: Kristoffer Haugsbakk <code@khaugsbakk.name>
> >
> > Because the signoff order tells you who left the comment.  So I was
> > wondering to myself why this uniform approach wasn’t used.
> >
> > † 1: Since the brackets become “non-trailer values” or something
> >    (git-interpret-trailers(1)), i.e. the discarded parts of the trailer
> >    block
> 
> I was just reminded of this: https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqikmce67y.fsf@gitster.g/T/#m68c22c9b7dbc9b295e923a913e9d67e3ab28a2a4
> 
> I’m just doing a little bump of this topic in case anyone has any
> thoughts.  I hope that is okay.

It is the same information _if_ there is another trailer with the ident that comes afterwards. In our project, you'd usually have a sign-off there. But not all projects would, and even in git.git you don't necessarily need one, depending on what is in the comment.

That said, if I were designing trailers from scratch today, I'd probably require something that looks more like "Comment:" just because it would reduce the complexity of the trailer parser (and its "non trailer portions"). But since we live in a world where we support that for historical reasons, I don't mind using it (I find it more natural to read, but possibly my mind is polluted by years of practice).

-Peff