Re: [BUG] git-rebase fails when a commit message contains a diff

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 9, 2007, 01:51 UTC
Message-ID: <7vhcjwxk1s.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vlk98xkm3.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> That's a known design limitation of applymbox/mailinfo.  Any
> line that looks like a beginning of a patch in e-mail ("^--- ",
> "^---$", "^diff -", and "^Index: ") terminates the commit log.

Ok, so that explains the symptom.  What's the next step?

 * The applymbox/mailinfo pair should continue to split the
   commit log message at the first such line.  There is no point
   breaking established workflow, and people in communities that
   exchange patches via e-mail already know to avoid this issue
   by indenting quoted diff snippet in the log message,
   e.g. 5be507fc.

 * There is no fundamental reason for rebase to use e-mail
   format to express what "format-patch | am -3" pipeline does.
   We do it currently because (1) it was expedient to reuse what
   was already there, and because (2) the original target
   audience of git are e-mail oriented communities, so there was
   not strong incentive to make rebase independent of the
   applymbox/mailinfo limitation (that is, even if you make
   rebase able to handle such a patch, you cannot send out the
   result over e-mail *anyway*).

   This however does not mean we should always use merging
   rebase.  patch based approach "format-patch | am -3" pipeline
   uses is often much faster.  Instead of using "format-patch |
   am -3", we could use more careful patch and message
   generation, like git-rebase--interactive.sh:make_patch()
   does.