Re: [PATCH] git-commit: add --verbatim to allow unstripped commit messages

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Dec 20, 2007, 23:55 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.9999.0712201545450.21557@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20071220233324.GB3052@steel.home>

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Alex Riesen wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> Yes, I afraid I need both. I use "git commit -t" almost (submission in
> perforce takes careful planning) every day. I also would like to keep
> the empty leading and trailing lines (perforce default GUI P4Win does
> not show them, but our scripts which check the descriptions will test
> the description text according to template which does have trailing
> empty lines).

Hmm. I think your updated patch was pretty good, although I still think it could be improved a bit. In particular, thinking more about it, I think we have more than an "on/off" switch - we really have three cases:

 a) strip whitespace _and_ comments
 b) strip unnecessary whitespace only
 c) leave things _totally_ alone

and on top of that we also have the issue of an editor.

So my patch basically said that in the absense of an editor, we'll still clean up whitespace, but not comments (ie "no_edit" implies doing (b) rather than (b)), while your patch basically results in (c) regardless of whether we run an editor or not.

But that still leaves one case: do we ever want to do (b) even *if* we use an editor? There's another possible choice: our old behaviour of (a) in the presense of an editor is now gone.

Now, that last choice (ie "case (a) without an editor") is not only unlikely to be anything people want to do anyway, it's also easy enough to do by just using "git stripspace -s" on whatever non-editor thing you feed to "git commit", so I don't think we need to worry about that one.

But the "maybe you want to run an editor, and you _do_ want case (b)" sounds like a case that is not at all unlikely. I could easily see the case where you want to have a template that uses '#', and *despite* that you want to (a) allow the user to edit things _and_ (b) clean up whitespace too.

So I'd almost suggest you make the "--verbatim" flag a three-way switch, to allow "totally verbatim" (leave everything in place) and a "don't touch comments" (just fix up whitespace) mode.

Hmm? Does that make sense to you?

			Linus