Re: [PATCH] commit: Add -f, --fixes <commit> option to add Fixes: line

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 11:10:13PM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote:

> * In your list
> 
> >   Fixes:
> >   Reported-by:
> >   Suggested-by:
> >   Improved-by:
> >   Acked-by:
> >   Reviewed-by:
> >   Tested-by:
> >   Signed-off-by:
> 
>   and I might add
> 
>     Cherry-picked-from:
>     Reverts:
> 
>   if one were to phrase that as a footer/pseudoheader, observe that
>   there are only two kinds of these: footers that contain identities,
>   and footers that contain references to commits.

I think people put other things in, too. For example, cross-referencing
bug-tracker ids.

In fact, if I saw "fixes: XXX", I would expect the latter to be a
tracker id.  People do this a lot with GitHub issues, because GitHub
will auto-close issue 123 if a commit with "fixes #123" is pushed to
master. Because of the "#", no pseudo-header is needed, but I have also
seen people use the footer style (I don't have any examples on-hand,
though).

That being said, in your examples:

> So why not support these use-cases?  We could have something like
> footer.foo.* configuration, e.g.
> 
> [footer "fixes"]
>         type = commit
>         suggest = true
> [footer "acked-by"]
>         type = identity

you could easily have "type=text" to handle arbitrary text.

-Peff