Re: More builtin git-am issues..

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Sep 5, 2015, 01:06 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFw-PObyj2boqpeA9DDcKeAuCGouT7Qd2Zw02+sxvd2CgA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqh9n9ele4.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 5:54 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> How about a bit looser rule like this?
>
>     A block of text at the end of the message, each and every
>     line in which must match "^[^:      ]+:[      ]" (that is,
>     a "keyword" that does not contain a whitespace nor a colon,
>     followed by a colon and whitespace, and arbitrary value thru
>     the end of line) is a signature block.

No. That's still broken.

The thing is, and that was what the report was all about, not every line _is_ of that format. We have commetns from the sign-off people. Things like this:

    Signed-off-by: Noam Camus <noamc@ezchip.com>
    Acked-by: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@synopsys.com>
    [ Also removed pointless cast from "void *".  - Linus ]
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

or

    Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
    [ Updated comments and changelog a bit. ]
    Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1424225886-18652-3-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

so no, it is simply not true that "every line must match".

I'm not even seeing why you argue for that, since clearly having a sign-off-line is actually a safer choice too. The "every line must match" rule is bad, not just because it's not true like above, but also because it can be true without it being a sign-off block.

For example, it's not at all unlikely that you have perfectly normal comments that just list some subsystem and their changes. Which could easily look like

   Trivial fixes all over the tree

   drm: fix whitespace
   mm: speeling errors
   kernel: indentation and codign style

The above looks like a perfectly sane commit log to me.

Do you seriously think that it makes for a better "sign-off block test" than one that actually checks for "is there a sign-off line"?

I'd much rather have special cases like testing for specific keywords or looking for things that look like emails, than make it about being "every line has this very generic format".

                     Linus