Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Jonathan, do you remember if the "be stricter" was in a response to > specific real world issues, or is this "we no longer allow whitespace" > an unintended side effect of the change? Rereading the relevant mailing list thread, I think it's a bit of both. The sequence of events was as follows: - I made a patch set that changed sequencer.c (which, among other things, controls the behavior of "commit -s") to use interpret-trailers's functionality. This caused a change in the behavior of a "commit -s" unit test (the "I want to mention about Signed-off-by: here." one), because "commit -s" previously did not support spaces before the separator. [1] - You mentioned that perhaps we should tighten it back. [2] - I agreed and tightened it, but didn't change the documentation. [3] [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/a416ab9b-ff1f-9a71-3e58-60fd4f8a6b8e@xxxxxxxxxx/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqtwbroykt.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ [3] https://lore.kernel.org/git/cover.1478028700.git.jonathantanmy@xxxxxxxxxx/ So the "real world issue" was a test in our test suite, and perhaps the side effect was unintended in that we wanted to preserve the behavior of "commit -s" but didn't think about other possible uses of interpret-trailers. > If the former, an equally valid "fix" to what Max reports here would > be to add such a real world issue or two as new tests to demonostrate > why allowing whitespaces was a mistake that hurts real-world workflow, > and fix the documentation. > > I actually am suspecting it is the latter, only because we would have > added a testcase to show why whitespaces in the trailer label is a > bad idea in e4319562 if this was triggered by a real-world issue. The "I want to mention about Signed-off-by: here." test might be a sufficient real-world issue. > I would say that it would be a disaster, if we took any random > line with colon : in it in the middle of the commit message and > mistook it as a trailer (like the line above), but since we do not > allow paragraph breaks in the trailer block, as long as the message > has a valid trailer block, it might not be a huge issue. I dunno. Yes, it would be fine if the paragraph was two or more lines long, but not if it's a single line.
