Re: git cherry-pick -x: missing blank line before the "cherry picked from commit" line

From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 4, 2022, 15:13 UTC
Message-ID: <a97758b5-dfdc-9a24-654b-8846a9feb45d@dunelm.org.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20221202170144.GC5599@cventin.lip.ens-lyon.fr>

Hi Vincent

On 02/12/2022 17:01, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

Show 29 quoted lines

> Hi Phillip,
> 
> On 2022-12-02 16:41:23 +0000, Phillip Wood wrote:
>> On 02/12/2022 14:11, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>>> With git 2.38.1 under Debian, when I use "git cherry-pick -x"
>>> on a commit such that the last line of the log message starts
>>> with "note:" (case insensitively), the blank line before the
>>> "cherry picked from commit" line is missing.
>>>
>>> For instance:
>>>
>>>       New commit
>>>       foo
>>>       nOtE:
>>>       (cherry picked from commit 3ba643e2eec4bdc1cd46b478ab36ee0707d241c2)
>>
>> "git cherry-pick -x" takes care not to add a blank line if there are
>> trailers such as Signed-off-by: at the end of the message (if it did then
>> the trailers would no longer be recognized as trailers as they would not be
>> the last paragraph). In this case the "nOtE:" line looks like a trailer and
>> so no blank line is added.
>>
>> I can see it is annoying in this case but I'm afraid I don't have any ideas
>> of how we could avoid it without breaking the case where the message does
>> contain trailers.
> 
> First, one issue is that this is not documented (I was not aware of
> the notion of trailers, well, at least concerning a special handling
> by Git).

They are mentioned in the documentation for 'git commit' see the --signoff and --trailer options. The main reference is 'git interpret-trailers'

> Then perhaps there should be some configuration to define which
> tokens are allowed (or forbidden) for trailers. For instance,
> I would say that "Note" is too common in log messages to be
> regarded as a trailer token.

There are some safeguards when looking for trailers (see the interpret-trailers man page) I think you have been unlucky here, I don't remember this being reported before. I've cc'd Christian who knows more about trailers than I do to see if he has anything to add.

Best Wishes

Phillip