Re: [PATCH 2/4] builtin/interpret-trailers: suppress blank line

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 7, 2016, 17:21 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqegah1gis.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqmvp51hhm.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 19 quoted lines

> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com> writes:
>
>> it's sometimes useful to be able to pass output message of
>> git-mailinfo through git-interpret-trailers,
>> but that creates problems since that does not
>> include the subject and an empty line after that,
>> making interpret-trailers add an empty line.
>>
>> Add a flag to bypass adding the blank line.
>
> I think I understand what you are trying to do, but using output
> that comes from 'mailinfo' alone as the input to anything (including
> interpret-trailers) does not make much sense.
>
> If you use the mailinfo output in the way it is expected to be used,
> i.e. take the subject from the "info" that goes to its standard
> output and append the "msg" with a blank between them, and feed the
> result to interpret-trailers, do you still need this step in your
> series?

OK, after reading 3/4 and guessing that you hand "msg" to interpret-trailers to let it munge its contents, it makes sense to allow us to tell interpret-trailers that you are feeding only the body of the message without the title and the blank line before it.

"suppress blank line" is a terrible title for that new feature, though. Perhaps "--body-only"?

The difference in behaviour in two modes (i.e. with title and without title) is that when the input does not have any blank line in it, the normal mode considers that there is no body (i.e. only title exists in the input) hence there is no existing trailer lines, and new trailer lines need to be added after adding blank, while the new "body only" mode considers that there is only one paragraph in the body, hence it may be the existing trailer block without any message (in which case that is the block new trailer lines are to be added to or existing ones to be removed from), or there is no trailer block but one paragraph of the message (in which case you would do the "add blank and append new trailer lines" thing).

I wrote the above down, hoping that it would give you a hint to better explain what this patch aims to do, so please feel free to further rephrase (or steal outright from) it when you reroll the series.

Thanks.