Re: [PATCH v4 5/8] trailer: clarify failure modes in parse_trailer

> Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com> writes:
>
>> That is true - I think we can take the allowed separators as an
>> argument (meaning that we can have different behavior for file parsing
>> and command line parsing), and since we already have that string, we
>> can use strcspn. I'll try this out in the next reroll.
>
> Sounds good.  Thanks.
>
>
> The following is a tangent that I think this topic should ignore,
> but we may want to revisit it sometime later.
>
> I think the design of the "separator" mechanism is one of the things
> we botched in the current system.  If I recall correctly, this was
> introduced to allow people write "Bug# 538" in the trailer section
> and get it recognised as a valid trailer.
>
> When I say that this was a botched design, I do not mean to say that
> we should have instead forced projects to adopt "Bug: 538" format.
> The design is botched because the users' wish to allow "Bug# 538" or
> "Bug #538" by setting separators to ":#" from the built-in ":" does
> not mean that they would want "Signed-off-by# me <my@addre.ss>" to
> be accepted.
>
> If I were guiding a topic that introduce this feature from scratch
> today, I would probably suggest a pattern based approach, e.g.  a
> built-in "[-A-Za-z0-9]+:" [*1*] may be the default prefix that is
> used to recognize the beginning of a trailer, and a user or a
> project that wants "Bug #538" would be allowed to add an additional
> pattern, e.g. "Bug *#", that recognises a custom trailer line that
> is used by the project.