On Sat, 3 Mar 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > I do not think I've asked Linus about how he originally came up > with "three dashes at the beginning of line" convention in the > kernel circle, but my guess always have been that it would > automatically allow us to accept patches prepared like this. Indeed. The three dashes are just two different usage cases: - bare patches. So we stop on --- Makefile.orig +++ Makefile exactly the same way we stop of "^diff -" and "Index: " - that then meant that I also extended it to ask people to add comments after a "---" section. That said, we could certainly require that it be: - either just three dashes on the line OR - three dashes, exactly one whitespace, and what looks like a filename (which in turn can have a date after it, that's what many versions of GNU patch do) but it won't remove the case where if somebody writes some text message that really *looks* like the beginning of a patch, it's what git "mailinfo" will use to split the patch from the top of the message. So we can tighten it up a bit, but people still need to be aware of this! Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html