Re: Comment trailers vs. bracketed lines

> On Sat, Oct 19, 2024, at 23:21, Jeff King wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 18, 2024, at 07:29, Jeff King wrote:
>>> […]
>>
>> I assigned authorship to Ramsay, so my name is not otherwise mentioned,
>> but appears in the signoff. So it was a way of mentioning what I
>> contributed (both for credit, but also in case anybody has questions
>> later).
>>
>> I guess "Commit-message-by:" would work, too. ;)
>
> I’ve done that when someone has given me a non-descript diff. :)
>
>> I think in the usual trailer order, it would be:
>>
>>   Signed-off-by: Ramsay
>>   [jk: add commit message]
>>   Signed-off-by: me
>>
>> but I didn't want to forge his S-o-b without asking first.
>
> I’ve seen those brackets in the log.  They used to happen with some
> regularity.  At first it made sense since you need a free-form area to
> both comment and tell everyone that you left the comment.  And a trailer
> doesn’t make sense for that, I thought.[1]
>
> 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