Re: git am and the wrong chunk of ---

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 10, 2012, 14:46 UTC
Message-ID: <7vsjbuls9h.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120810103612.GA21562@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 21 quoted lines

> If I understand your issue, somebody is writing:
>
>
>     From: them
>     To: you
>     Date: ...
>     Subject: [PATCH] subject line
>
>     commit message body
>     ....
>
>     some cover letter material that should go below the "---"
>     ---
>       [diffstat + diff]
>
> How do you know when the commit message body ends, and the cover letter
> begins? We already have two machine-readable formats for separating the
> two ("---" after the commit message, and "-- >8 --" scissors before). Is
> there some machine-readable hint? Is it always the paragraph before the
> "---"? Chopping that off unconditionally seems like a dangerous
> heuristic.

Or it could be like this:

    ...
    Subject: [PATCH] patch title

    Heya,

    I was walking my dog when I found a solution to this
    problem the other day.  Here it is.

    commit message body

    S-o-b: ...
    ---

And I agree that clever heuristics are dangerous. We need to draw a line somewhere anyway, and the line should be at the place that is easily understandable to people. That means mechanically parseable and easy to follow convention to use markers e.g. "---".