On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 9:03 PM Maxwell Bernstein <tekk.nolagi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. I think allowing one white space before the separator is a good idea for the following reasons. First, if people use something like #, !, ~ or % as a separator, for example in the case of a trailer like "Bug #43", it is very natural to have a white space before the # separator. Note that GitLab for example uses the ~N format, where N is a number, for issues, !N for merge requests and %N for milestones. I think Bugzilla and many other bug trackers use a #N format for bug numbers. Also in some languages, like French, the typographical rules when writing regular text is to have a space (technically it's supposed to be a "non breaking space", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space, but in practice people use a regular space most of the time) before a colon. So it is very natural for a number of people in the world to automatically add a white space before a colon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colon_(punctuation)#Spacing says: "In print, a thin space was traditionally placed before a colon and a thick space after it. In modern English-language printing, no space is placed before a colon and a single space is placed after it. In French-language typing and printing, the traditional rules are preserved. " I think it would be very annoying for users to find out that a number of otherwise proper trailers would not be taken into account only because they have a white space before the colon. At least there should be an option to allow that.
