Could #-ignoring in commit message be smarter?

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 4, 2010, 22:24 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTimgt6kjTkc+gxyOmTz03bdnfiRzgt4p8vymQ=VY@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 21:55, Sverre Rabbelier <srabbelier@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Heya,
>
> On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 16:37, Ramana Kumar <ramana.kumar@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The commit message message says "Lines starting with '#' will be
>> ignored", but fails to say "Lines below this message will be ignored,
>> even if they don't start with '#'".
>
> Because they're not. Only those starting with # are ignored.

Which also sucks a bit. I've been bit by writing commits messages like this numerous times:

    parser: fix non-\W issues

    This change is here to fix screwups of special characters like %, !,
    #, ^ and other non-\W chars.

    These characters screw up our parser.

    # Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
    # with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
    # On branch master
    # Changes to be committed:
    #   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
    #
    #   modified:   parser.c

Where I'm referencing the #-character in the commit message itself for some reason, and due to word wrapping it just *happens* to end up at the start of a line. So the commit message silently becomes:

    parser: fix non-\W issues

    This change is here to fix screwups of special characters like %, !,

    These characters screw up our parser.

The main reason for why this probably can't be fixed is that we've painted ourselves into a corner with git rebase -i squash and fixup messages, which will insert comments themselves.

Still *maybe* we could handle this better for the common case. E.g. if we're *not* inside a rebase only ignore the continuous and unbroken lines starting with # at the bottom. But that'd probably break something I'm not thinking of.