On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 2:18 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> That is true - I think we can take the allowed separators as an >> argument (meaning that we can have different behavior for file parsing >> and command line parsing), and since we already have that string, we >> can use strcspn. I'll try this out in the next reroll. > > Sounds good. Thanks. > > > The following is a tangent that I think this topic should ignore, > but we may want to revisit it sometime later. > > I think the design of the "separator" mechanism is one of the things > we botched in the current system. If I recall correctly, this was > introduced to allow people write "Bug# 538" in the trailer section > and get it recognised as a valid trailer. > > When I say that this was a botched design, I do not mean to say that > we should have instead forced projects to adopt "Bug: 538" format. > The design is botched because the users' wish to allow "Bug# 538" or > "Bug #538" by setting separators to ":#" from the built-in ":" does > not mean that they would want "Signed-off-by# me <my@xxxxxxxx>" to > be accepted. > > If I were guiding a topic that introduce this feature from scratch > today, I would probably suggest a pattern based approach, e.g. a > built-in "[-A-Za-z0-9]+:" [*1*] may be the default prefix that is > used to recognize the beginning of a trailer, and a user or a > project that wants "Bug #538" would be allowed to add an additional > pattern, e.g. "Bug *#", that recognises a custom trailer line that > is used by the project. When we designed the separator mechanism, we had the following discussions: https://public-inbox.org/git/xmqqa9a1d6xn.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ https://public-inbox.org/git/xmqqmwcuzyqx.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ They made me think that you were against too much flexibility, so I removed functionality that allowed to put separators into the ".key" config options, and now you are saying that we botched the thing and that you would like more flexibility of this kind back. Anyway I think it is still possible to add back such kind of functionality in a backward compatible way for example by adding ".extendedKey" config options.