Re: [PATCH v2] trailer: allow spaces in tokens

From: Maxwell Bernstein <tekk.nolagi@gmail.com>
To: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>,
	"Max Bernstein via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com>
Cc: <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	"Max Bernstein" <donotemailthisaddress@bernsteinbear.com>,
	"Max Bernstein" <max@bernsteinbear.com>,
	"Christian Couder" <christian.couder@gmail.com>,
	"Jonathan Tan" <jonathantanmy@google.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] trailer: allow spaces in tokens
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2022 12:03:19 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CM9DZ4Z18PY9.1T2O8U54X66FD@cedar> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <xmqqk075qyq0.fsf@gitster.g>

On Thu Aug 18, 2022 at 9:54 AM PDT, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> So, the updated code mistook the body of the message that is not a
> sign-off, because there is a colon on the line, the line does not
> begin with the colon, and everything before the colon is an alnum or
> a whitespace, so squashed the paragraph break before the real
> trailer block and the last line of the body and made it a body-less
> commit log message?

I agree that it is not ideal, and I'm not sure how to fix it. This commit
probably shouldn't go in as-is; I modified the test in order to demonstrate
this problem.

> This might be a good demonstration of why it is a mistaken design to
> allow whitespaces, which may steer us toward fixing the documentation?
>
> I dunno.  What do others think?

I think allowing whitespace is good at least for the Phabricator project, which
despite being dead, has a number of existing users and existing commits. It
unfortunately has a "Differential revision" trailer with whitespace.