Re: [RFC/PATCH 0/2] place cherry pick line below commit title

From: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2016, 00:08 UTC
Message-ID: <84f28caa-2e4b-1231-1a76-3b7e765c0b61@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq8tu55bel.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On 10/03/2016 03:13 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> writes:
>
>> There are other options like checking for indentation or checking for
>> balanced parentheses/brackets, but I think that these would lead to
>> surprising behavior for the user (this would mean that whitespace or
>> certain characters could turn a valid trailer into an invalid one or
>> vice versa, or change the behavior of trailer.ifexists, especially
>> "replace").
>
> Yes, that is exactly why I said that it may be necessary for the
> code to analize the lines in a block identified as "likely to be a
> trailing block" more carefully.  We can afford to be loose as long
> as the only allowed operation is to append one at the end, but once
> we start removing/replacing an existing entry, etc., the definition
> of what an entry is becomes very much relevant.

I agree, and I was trying to discuss the possible alternatives for the definition of what an entry is in my previous e-mail.

If you think that the alternatives are still too loose, I'm not sure if we can make it any tighter. As far as I know, we're dealing with trailers like the following:

   Signed-off-by: A <author@example.com>
   [This has nothing to do with the above line]
   Signed-off-by: B <buthor@example.com>

and:

   Link 1: a link
     a continuation of the above

and:

   Signed-off-by: Some body <some@body.xz> (comment
   on two lines)

As I stated in the quoted paragraph, one possibility is to use indentation and/or balanced parentheses/brackets to determine if a trailer line continues onto the next line, and this would handle all the above cases, but I still think that these would lead to surprising behavior. Hence my suggestion to just simply define it as a single physical line. But if you think that the pros (of the more complicated approach) outweigh the cons, I'm OK with that.

One alternative is to postpone this decision by changing sequencer only (and not trailer) to tolerate other lines in the trailer. This would make them even more divergent (sequencer supports arbitrary lines while trailer doesn't), but they were divergent already (sequencer supports "(cherry picked by" but trailer doesn't).