Re: [PATCH] blame: fix unblamable and ignored lines in porcelain mode

> Karthik Nayak <karthik.188@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> However, this option was never extended to the porcelain mode of
>> 'git-blame(1)'. Since the documentation does not indicate this
>> exclusion, it is a bug.
>
> I agree it is a bug when people added ignore or unblamable support
> that they did not _consider_ what to do with their new pieces of
> information to help porcelain writers.  It is not a bug in the code
> per-se, but it is a bug in the brain of these people ;-)
>
> But prefixing random garbage to the commit object name line in the
> porcelain mode output does not sound like the right solution to the
> bug, either.
>
> When enhancing an existing output format, make sure that your
> changes will have minimum empact to existing parsers that do not
> know about your extension.  It is reasonably expected that existing
> Porcelain scripts reading from --porcelain mode output works by
>
>  - Recognizing a line that match "^[0-9a-f]{40} \d+ \d+ \d+$" and
>    take it as the beginning of a new record;
>
>  - Collect all info lines before the payload line.  Lines that
>    describe per-commit information are not repeated if it is already
>    shown, so remember them when you see the commit for the first
>    time, and recall them when you recognize the commit you already
>    saw.
>
>  - A payload line is indented with HT and terminates the record.
>
> If you start to add unrecognizable garbage to the line with very
> well known fixed format that is used as record delimiter, you would
> break the existing parsers, which is not a very nice thing to do.
> Are there other and better ways you can think of to add new pieces
> of information like this in a way with less severe damage?